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EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


vy BY 
JABEZ T. SUNDERLAND, A.M., D.D. 


AUTHOR OF “THE ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE 
BIBLE,” ETC. 


With an Introduction by 


DAVID STARR JORDAN 


‘That was not first which was spiritual, but that 
which is natural; and afterward that which is 
spiritual,” — Paul 


“TI, too, rest in faith. That man’s perfection is 
the crowning flower, toward which the urgent sap 
in life’s great tree is pressing.” —George Eliot. 


1925 
THE BEACON PRESS, INC. 
“ BOSTON 





Copyright, 1925, By 
THE BEACON PRESS, INC. 
All rights reserved 
PRINTED IN U.S. A. 


“No more sublime conception of God has ever been 
presented to the mind of man than that which is fur- 
nished by Evolution, when it represents him as reveal- 
ing himself through countless ages in the develop- 
ment of the earth as an abode for man, and in the 
age-long inbreathing of life into its constituent matter, 
culminating in man with his spiritual nature and all 
his God-like powers.”——PROFESSOR ROBERT A. MILUI- 
KAN. 


“A Scientist Confesses his Faith” (1928), p. 27. 


iii. 


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PREFACE 


THIS book has two very simple and prac- 
tical objects in view. One is, to make clear, 
if it may, within a brief compass, the main 
reasons why the scientists of the world, with 
searcely any exceptions, accept the doctrine 
of Evolution as true. 

The other is, to state as candidly and clear- 
ly as possible the author’s reasons (which cer- 
tainly coincide with those of very many 
other persons) for regarding Evolution as 
not an Enemy, but, when rightly understood, 
a Friend and Ally of Religion. 

As stated by Dr. Jordan in his Introduction 
which follows, the book in its first form was 
written several years ago, and published un- 
der the not very accurate and rather confus- 
ing title, ‘The Spark in the Clod.” At that 
time there was not much public discussion of 
the truth of Evolution—it being generally 
_ believed, by scientists at least, that the ques- 
tion had been settled once for all and that 
the intelligence of the world had accepted the 
doctrine with essentially the same unanimity 


Vv. 


vi. PREFACE 


as it had accepted gravitation and the spher- 
icity of the earth. 

Nor was there much public discussion of 
the Relation of Evolution to Religion. The 
old battle waged against Evolution from a 
theological standpoint, on the ground that 
it was atheistical and destroyed religion and 
the Bible, which was waged with such fury 
for twenty years and more after the appear- 
ance of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and 
“Descent of Man,” had died away, and it was 
widely believed among liberal religious think- 
ers as well as among scientists, that it would 
never be revived. | 

But two or three years ago the whole coun- 
try was suddenly startled to find that the old 
battle was on once more, and with hardly 
less intensity than in the days of Darwin, 
Huxley, and Spencer. And to-day there seems 
to be no waning of the struggle or sign of 
truce. On the contrary, great Christian de- 
nominations are making belief or non-belief 
in Evolution a test of religious fellowship, 
and the matter threatens permanently to di- 
vide churches. Most surprising of all, and 
perhaps most to be regretted, it is being wide- 
ly made an educational and political ques- 
tion. State Legislatures are actually by le- 
gal entactment forbidding the teaching of 


PREFACE vii. 


Evolution in all state-aided schools and col- 
leges—something which five years agro would 
have been unthinkable. 

As already intimated, the ground of the 
opposition to Evolution is mainly religious. 
The old claim of forty or fifty years ago is 
revived with fervid excitement, that it con- 
tradicts the Bible account of the origin of the 
world and of man, and therefore destroys 
belief in God and overthrows religion. Thus 
we have the amazing spectacle, not only of 
both religion and science being dragged in- 
to the arena of politics, but actually of leg- 
islatures setting themselves up as judges 
of what is and what is not true science, and of 
what is and what is not true religion. 

It is in view of this very serious condition 
of things, and with the hope of contributing 
a little to a true understanding of the iss. es 
involved, that a new, revised, and enlarged 
edition of the present book is offered to the 
public. It is believed that it is in the highest 
degree timely. All the questions that are 
now attracting public attention, both as to 
the truth of Evolution, and as to its relation 
to Religion, are discussed in the light of the 
fullest obtainable knowledge, and it is be- 
lieved in a spirit of absolute fairness and can- 
dor. 


viii. PREFACE 


Much additional value is given to the book 
by the illuminating Introduction written by 
the eminent scientist, Dr. David Starr Jor- 
dan, President-Emeritus of Leland Stanford 
University, and by the three important Ap- 
pendices, the first giving a condensed sum- 
mary of the forces arrayed against Evolution, 
and the others containing significant Testi- 
monies regarding the truth of Evolution and 
its real relation to Religion. 

An extended Bibliography has also been 
added, which will inform persons desiring 
further knowledge, where to find the most 
authoritative and the latest works bearing 
on all points discussed in these pages. 


J. T. SUNDERLAND. 
New York, September, 1925 


INTRODUCTION 
BY 
DAVID STARR JORDAN 


DR. SUNDERLAND’S series of Essays on Re- 
ligion and its relation to Organic Evolution 
was first published under the poetical title of 
“The Spark in the Clod.” The volume is now 
reissued with some revision, with important 
additions, with an adequate and excellent 
Bibliography, and under a title more simply 
and truly descriptive of the author’s purpose. 
This purpose is to show that between what 
men have found out of the Universe and its 
Creator, through long research with instru- 
ments of precision, cannot be at variance 
with the emotions in the human mind in con- 
templation of the same facts and forces; that 
is to say, cannot be at variance with true 
religion. 

Science deals with objective facts, and by 
its own methods, methods which are the 
source of all knowledge, human experience 
tested and set in order: each detail verified 
through instruments and methods of preci-. 


ix. 


<7 INTRODUCTION 


sion, the facts ascertained being then placed 
in rational relation. These become truth to 
us, when made intelligible, that is, stated in 
terms of our own experience. 

Science deals with what men have found 
out, not with what they think out, nor with 
what they dream or fancy, nor again with 
ideas they have inherited from times when 
tradition was subject to no means of correc- 
tion. The word Evolution, borrowed from 
philosophy, means in Science, Orderly 
Change. We see with our own eyes that all 
objects within our ken are always changing, 
and that all change is throughout orderly. To 
recognize order in the Universe marks the 
advance from Paganism to Science. In the 
Universe of which we are part, using Hux- 
ley’s words, “Nothing endures save the flow 
of energy and the rational intelligence which 
pervades it.” This “Intelligence” we may 
not define nor describe, for that would be 
to circumscribe the Infinite. But no student 
of Science can doubt its reality, and in cen- 
turies of belief in little vengeful, and schem- 
ing gods, scientific men are forced into the 
position of defenders of the faith, as against 
the limitations of certain types of mind who 
can visualize only gods made in their own 
image. 


INTRODUCTION xi 


As everything we know is in a state of 
Orderly Change, Evolution is but another 
name for Nature, as Dr. Vernon Kellogg has 
lately pointed out. But under the head of 
Evolution two different series of processes 
are included, the physical and the biological. 
Changes may be relatively simple dealing 
with units which may be assumed to be en- 
tirely alike. From such conditions arise the 
so-called exact sciences, those in which math- 
ematics or the logic of quantities can be 
brought into play, thus extending, not knowl- 
edge, for mathematics adds no facts, but our 
recognition of the full significance of the 
facts we have. Thus physics, and its great 
expansion astronomy, deal with motion, the 
pushing and pulling of objects assumed to be 
uniform. The science of chemistry deals with 
internal conditions of objects, again assumed 
to be alike, except for relations of atoms as 
affecting one another by unions or repulsions. 
This too is relatively exact science, because 
mathematics is one of its instruments of 
precision. 

Set off against Physics and Chemistry we 
have the science of Life or Biology. It deals 
with the same chemical elements, subject to 
the same physical laws, but under a new re- 
lation, that of Organization. All living be- 


xii. INTRODUCTION 


ings are organized, that is made up of parts 
having different functions and definite con- 
nections one with another. Thus living crea- 
tures large or small, simple or complex, differ 
in certain respects from all inorganic or un- 
organized masses of matter. 

All living beings possess Individuality. 
That is, no two are alike, though common 
likenesses among them permit and demand 
classification. Such resemblances when deep- 
seated have but one known explanation, that 
is, of origin through common heredity. All 
organisms possess Irritability. That is, they 
are affected by external influences. This 
feature ranges from the ‘“‘touchiness” of one- 
celled creatures, through perfect intergrada- 
tions, to reflex action which culminates in 
Instinct on the one hand and on the other 
Intellect, the highest manifestation of coop- 
erative cell action. All organisms demand 
Embolism. They wear out their own sub- 
stance, replacing it by food. All organisms 
have the function of Reproduction. They cast 
off germ-cells which are capable under favor- 
able circumstances of developing into the like- 
ness of parents or ancestors. Finally Organ- 
isms are subject to Evolution, from genera- 
tion to generation, a relation unknown in 
Physics and Chemistry. 


INTRODUCTION xiii. 


In brief, Organic Evolution is the process 
whereby those organisms which have run the 
gauntlet of life leave progeny like themselves, 
likewise capable of endurance and adaptation, 
while those weaker or less adaptable tend to 
fall behind or perish in the race. This proc- 
ess is called Natural Selection, and consti- 
tutes, with the innate traits of Heredity and 
Variation, the controlling factor of Organic 
Evolution. These however do not constitute 
the sole factor concerned in life divergence. 
In the Origin of Species the fina] division or 
moulding is due to some form of “biological 
friction” which, through its many forms of 
barrier, causes separation and segregation 
within each group. 

With all these matters science and science 
only is concerned. Science deals with real- 
ities: that is with objective facts as impress- 
ed on the nervous system of man. Its con- 
clusions are thus to be distinguished from 
memories (or past realities) from philosoph- 
ical deductions, superstitions, fancies, de- 
lusions, illusions, and from isolated facts not 
yet set in order. We know no source of ob- 
jective truth other than the human senses, 
and no test of truth save through the verifi- 
cation and expansion of the senses through 
instruments of precision. The scope of 


xiv. INTRODUCTION 


Science includes therefore all objective truth 
and it questions the validity of all others. 

The scope of Religion depends on the 
definition we give to the term. The word is 
used in different senses, these bearing a cer- 
tain relation one to another, but by no means 
identical in fact or spirit. From the stand- 
point of scientific analysis religion is the in- 
stinct of fear, awe, reverence, worship, faith, 
duty, response to the lure of happiness, aris- 
ing from the recognition of the gigantic 
forces which surround humanity, and of our 
desire to act in accord with their supposed 
demands. In a historic sense a religion is 
definable as the form in which the spirit of 
reverence has become embodied in human 
traditions and institutions. It is a system 
of belief as well as of worship, and as such, 
creeds, ceremonials, and organization have 
grown up around it, either as aids, as para- 
sites, or as both. The distinction between 
the two uses of the word is indicated in the 
epigram: Religions die, Religion never! 

Religions are historic and traditional. The 
assumed data of one religion are often con- 
tradictory to those of another, and as Science 
moves more rapidly than belief, the assumed 
“fundamentals” of all of them become more 
or less at variance with knowledge. 


INTEODUCTION xv. 


Religion is natural and inherent, as un- 
escapable as the feeling of love to which it 
is closely akin, the two being subject to like 
suppressions and like perversions. Both 
spring “eternal in the human breast.” The 
spirit of religion is quite as likely to be found 
in dissent from historic religion as in con- 
formity with it. All creeds have, in fact, 
been written by heretics, that is, by dissen- 
ters from the prevailing beliefs of the times. 

In a strict or scientific sense Religion is 
personal or individual. One may join an- 
other’s communion, enter another’s cult, or 
accept another’s creed, but individual religion 
admits of no compromise. The question of 
whether a religion is true or not has no mean- 
ing. Religion does not rest on statements of 
fact, either of science or of history. The 
actual problem is as to whether impulses, 
emotions, opinions or actions called religious 
work out for human betterment. ‘Pure re- 
ligion and undefiled” is not concerned with 
theological subtleties. Its test is, Does it 
“feed my lambs?” 

In this Introduction I have briefly indi- 
cated a layman’s point of view of some ele- 
ments involved in the warfare of religion and 
science. No such conflict can exist except 
in the region in which tradition and super- 


xvi. INTRODUCTION 


stition have attempted to forestall knowl- 
edge. No problem of fact has been worked 
out completely. Still less is there any which 
have been thought out accurately in advance 
of finding out. For example, churches and 
schools have for two centuries done homage 
to the ignorant and arrogant dictum of 
Archbishop Usher as to the age of the. Uni- 
verse. ‘‘Heaven and earth, center and cir- 
cumference, were created all together in the 
same instant, with clouds full of water, on 
October 23, 4004 B.c. at nine o’clock in the 
morning.” . 
When nonsense like this is assumed to be 
part of religion, it is not strange that com- 
mon sense revolts. The real conflict there- 
fore is not with Evolution or with any other 
technical conclusion of Science, but with the 
common sense of humanity, which finds no 
virtue in superstition or in believing or pre- 
tending to believe what we know is not true. 
The same general views of nature and of 
man are set forth by Dr. Sunderland from the 
different point of view of a religious teacher. 


Stanford University, June 30, 1925. 


CONTENTS 


PREFACE : ; } ‘ i ; ’ 
INTRODUCTION a 2 ; fi ; 
CHAPTER 


I, THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD ‘ b 
II. THE EVOLUTION OF MAN é 3 4 
Ill. THE EVoLuTION oF RELIGION . 4 ‘ 


IV. THE PROBLEM OF PAIN AND EVIL IN THE 
LIGHT OF EVOLUTION . s 3 , 


V. IMMORTALITY IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLU- 
TION es es s se e e . 


VI. THE BIBLE, JESUS, AND CHRISTIANITY IN 
THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION . 


APPENDIX 


I. THE BATTLE TO DRIVE EVOLUTION OUT OF 
THE SCHOOLS. ANTI-EVOLUTION FORCES 


II. TESTIMONIES OF EMINENT SCIENTISTS AS 
TO THE TRUTH OF EVOLUTION AND ITS 
REAL RELATION TO RELIGION i 


III. EvoLuTion INTERPRETED. ITs TRUE AND 
DEEPER MEANING . x ; § 


BIBLIOGRAPHY ; ; : . ; 7 


106 


131 


156 


164 


175 
183 





EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


CHAPTER I 
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 


As to the manner in which the physical world 
came into existence, two theories offer them- 
selves for our choice; only two. One is the 
old theory, to which we have been accustomed 
‘all our lives. The other is the new theory, 
which science teaches. In other words, one 
is the theory of creation in a limited fixed 
time, set forth in the book of Genesis. The 
other is the modern scientific theory of Evo- 
lution. 

As thoughtful, candid, truth-loving men 
and women, which of these theories shall we 
accept? I do not mean, which would we pre- 
fer to accept, if both were equally true. But 
which must we accept, if we are to follow the 
evidence which offers itself to us? 

One of the most interesting revelations of 
modern scholarship is the fact that nearly all 
nations and peoples have their cosmogonies, 
or theories of creation. 

As soon as men rise above a very low grade 
of civilization, they begin inevitably to ask 


2 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


themselves questions about the origin and 
meaning of their own existence and that of 
the world around them. Where did I come 
from? Where did the world come from? 
How did things come to be as they are? And 
as children asking questions about the cause 
of strange phenomena, and not getting sat- 
isfactory answers, are very likely to make 
up answers of their own, so men in all parts 
of the world are found to have made up an- 
swers to these questions of theirs about the 
origin of the world and of human life. 
These answers are their cosmogonies. This 
explains the fact that, somewhere in the more 
ancient portions of the literature of most 
peoples that have a literature at all (usually 
in their sacred books, if they have such 
books) there are found recorded more or less 
extensive cosmogonies, or accounts of the 
creation of the world and of man, according 
to the theories which they have thought out 
for themselves on these subjects; and even 
among peoples who have no literature and 
no written language, it is common to find 
legends and tales of the same character, 
which pass from person to person and are 
handed down from father to son orally. 

Thus it appears that our Bible is not alone 
in containing a cosmogony. 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 3 


It will, perhaps, be worth our while, before 
examining the cosmogeny of Genesis, to 
glance briefly at a few of the creation theories 
which are, or have been, entertained by 
non-Christian peoples. 

Sir John Lubbock tells us that when a mis- 
Sionary asked the Queen of Singa, in West- 
ern Africa, who made the world, she replied 
without hesitation, ““My ancestors.” This is 
one form of the creation theory. 

Some rude tribes believe that all things 
made themselves. This is another form. 

The idea that all things originated in some 
way from water, has been very widely enter- 
tained, particularly among primitive peoples. 
The Chippewa Indians held the conception of 
the world as originally existing in the form 
of a vast body of water, out of which the 
Great Spirit raised the land. The Mingoes 
and Ottawas represent a rat as bringing a 
grain of sand from the bottom of the prim- 
itive ocean, and out of that sand-grain the 
dry land grew. Unfortunately, they do not 
tell us the origin of the rat. In Polynesian 
mythology the earth and heaven always ex- 
isted; but the earth was at first covered with 
water. At length the Supreme Being drew 
up New Zealand by means of an enchanted 
fish-hook. 


4 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 


The conception of the world as orginating 
in an egg is the one which perhaps has been 
most widely held. This conception, under 
one form or another, is found in Finland, 
Polynesia, China, Phenicia, Egypt, and 
India. The notion of the Finns was that the 
yolk of the primal egg became the earth, and 
the white the all-surrounding ocean. This 
reminds one of the idea of the Brahmans, 
found in the Laws of Manu, one of the 
Sacred Books of India, which opens with a 
cosmogony, as does our Old Testament. In 
that cosmogony we are told of the Self-exist- 
ent Lord, who with a thought created the 
waters, and deposited in them a seed, which 
became a golden egg, in which egg he himself 
was born as Brahma, the progenitor of all 
the worlds. 

The Scandinavian legend of creation gives 
us first of alla yawning gulf of chaos or noth- 
ingness. On the north of it was a region 
of boundless ice, and on the south another of 
boundless flame. From the contact of the ice 
and the fire arose the giant Ymir, from whose 
body, after he had been slain, were formed 
the earth and the heavens. 

According to the Greek cosmogony, in the 
beginning was a vast and formless chaos, 
from which the earth and heaven separated 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 5 


themselves as independent divinities. These 
married, and from them sprung demigods 
and men. 

The Zend-Avesta, “he sacred book of the 
ancient Persians, carries the beginning of 
creation back to the Eternal Being. The 
Eternal Being produced two gods; Ormuzd 
the God of Light, and Ahriman the God of 
Darkness. The God of Light created the 
heavens and the earth, in six periods of time, 
man being made last. 

It is not strange that many of these crea- 
tion theories, coming from so early periods 
as they do in the history of races, should be 
crude and even childish. Some of them, how- 
ever, manifest much reflection and insight. 
For example, some of the thoughts expressed 
in the Hindu Vedas regarding God as the 
Creator and upholder of all things, are very 
lofty. I will quote a few lines of a hymn 
from the Rig Veda, which is probably older 
than any portion of our own Bible, and many 
centuries older than the book of Genesis. 
Sings the ancient Hindu poet: 


“In the beginning there arose the Source of golden 
light ; 

He was the only born Lord of all that is: He 
established the earth and the sky; 


6 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


“He who through his power is the only King of the 
breathing and awakening world, 
He who governs all, man and beast; 


“He whose power these snowy mountains, whose 
power the sea proclaims, with the distant river; 
He whose these regions are, as it were, his two arms; 


“He through whom the sky is bright and the earth 
firm, 

He through whom the heaven was established, he who 
measured out the light in the air; 


“He who by his might looked even over the water- 
clouds, 
He who is the one God above the gods; 


“QO Prajapati, no other than thou is Lord over all 
these created things.’ 


Though this Vedic hymn does not lay down 
any complete order of creation, yet its gen- 
eral conception of creation, and of God as the 
Creator, is very high, and is worthy, as Max 
Miller so well urges, to stand beside the 
highest utterances of the Old Testament on 
this subject. 

What are these creation stories? Are they 
history? Are they records of real events? 
Are they not rather legends, myths, dreams, 
creations of the imaginative faculty of men 
asking themselves these questions, which all 
men must ask, of how the world and the 


1 Rig Veda, x. 121 (abridged). 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 7 


things that it contains came to be. And final- 
ly, coming to our own story of the creation, 
as it appears in the book of Genesis, is it 
different in kind? Or does it fall into the 
same class with those which we have found 
among other peoples? Is there any more 
reason for believing that the Hebrew cos- 
mogony is actual history than there is for be- 
lieving that the cosmogonies of Greece and 
India are history? Does the Genesis story 
bear any marks of history? Does it stand the 
tests of modern science? Or does a critical 
examination show at every point its legend- 
ary character? Let us see. 

As preliminary to such an examination, let 
me quote the words of Dean Stanley, spoken 
in Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Sir 
Charles Lyell, the great geologist. Said 
Stanley :— 


“It is well known that when the study of geology 
first arose it was involved in interminable schemes 
of reconcilation with the letter of the Scripture. 
There were and are two modes of reconciliation, 
which have each totally and deservedly failed. 
The one attempts to wrest the words of the Bible 
from their real meaning, and force them to speak 
the language of science; and the other attempts to 
falsify science to meet the supposed requirements 
of the Bible. It is now clear to all students of the 
Bible that the first and second chapters of Genesis 


8 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


contain two narratives of the creation, side by side, 
differing from each other in almost every particular 
of time, place, and order. It is now known that the 
vast epochs demanded by scientific observation are 
incompatible both with the 6,000 years of the 
Mosaic chronology and the six days of the Mosaic 
creation.” 


It should be borne in mind that this is the 
utterance, not of a radical or an iconoclast, 
but of one of the most conscientious and de- 
vout of modern Christian scholars. I wish 
especially to call attention to his statement 
that there are two narratives, and that they 
are contradictory—though both involve the 
theory of special creations, and are equally 
hostile to the theory of Evolution. Where 
are these two narratives to be found? The 
first begins with Genesis 1:1, and ends with 
Genesis 2:4 (middle of verse); the second 
begins where the first leaves off, and ends 
with Genesis 2:25. Let us inquire with some 
care as to the contents of the first, leaving 
the other for examination in the following 
chapter, with which it is more closely related. 

The first Genesis story of creation opens 
with the words: “In the beginning God 
created the heavens and the earth.” As it 
proceeds it states the time occupied in the 
creative work to have been six days—each 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 9 


with its evening and morning; and it informs 
us what objects were made each day. 

On the first day light was created, and di- 
vided from the darkness, thus causing day 
and night. On the second day a firmament, 
that is, a roof or dome (what we call the sky, 
believed by the Hebrews to he solid like 
glass) was made, to separate the waters 
above it (stored there as reservoirs for rain) 
from the waters below it. We learn else- 
where that this firmament or crystal dome 
was believed to have in it windows, which 
could be opened when it was necessary to 
pour down rain upon the earth. On the 
third day, the remainder of the waters 
(those that were beneath the sky-roof) were 
collected together to form the seas; and the 
land which was thus brought to view was 
made to bring forth grass, herbs, and trees. 
On the fourth day God created the sun, moon, 
and stars. On the fifth day he made the fish 
of the sea and the birds of the air. On the 
sixth day he caused the earth to bring forth 
four-footed beasts and creeping things; and 
finally, he created man in his own image. 
This completes the six days of the working 
week which the Creator is represented as 
observing. On the following day, the Sab- 
bath, he rested. 


10 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


Such is the first of the Genesis stories of 
the creation of the world and the things 
which it contains. 

What are we to say concerning this story? 
First, who wrote it? We do not know. Did 
not Moses? No biblical scholar of any stand- 
. ing now holds to the Mosaic authorship of 
Genesis. Could the writer, whoever he was, 
have been an eye-witness? Certainly not, 
for most of the events described occurred 
before the creation of man. The only way 
the writer could know about the facts was 
by being told by the Creator himself. Does 
the writer of Genesis claim that the Creator 
‘gave him information? Certainly not. 

Do we know when and where this story 
arose? Approximately, yes. It seems to 
have arisen not in Palestine, but in Baby- 
lonia. The Genesis creation-narratives, as 
also those of the Fall and the Flood, appear 
to have been originally Babylonian or Chal- 
dean legends or myths. They seem to 
have been obtained by the Jews from 
Babylon, perhaps at the time of their cap- 
tivity there, about five and a half centuries 
before Christ, or perhaps much earlier, and 
to have been revised and changed by them, 
and finally adopted and given a place in their 
Book of Genesis, which is not the oldest, but 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 11 


one of the later books of the Old Testament. 

But if we find the Genesis record without 
value as history, we also find it containing 
statements which invalidate it as science. 

First of all, its time is too short—almost 
infinitely so—to be a true account of the 
creation of the world. To be sure, there is 
a system of interpretation which claims that 
the “days” mentioned in Genesis mean, not 
days, but indefinite periods which may be 
prolonged to enormous lengths. But there is 
nothing in the record which warrants any 
such interpretation. The narrative is plain, 
simple, straightforward. The days are 
spoken of as real days, each having its eve- 
ning and its morning. Everything shows that 
the writer meant exactly what he said, name- 
ly, literal “days.” Any system of interpre- 
tation which makes him mean anything else 
is one which turns the whole Bible into a 
book of riddles. 

An equal difficulty is the lateness of the 
creation, or its nearness to our own time. 
If we turn to our Bibles, in the common ver- 
sion, we find printed in the margin opposite 
the creation story, the date, 4004 B.c. By any 
fair interpretation of the Old Testament rec- 
ords, it is impossible to carry back the date 
of the creation as given in Genesis much be- 


12 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 


yond that time. According to this reckoning 
the earth is a little less than six thousand 
years old. The sun and stars are of the same 
age. But science teaches us that to find the 
beginning of the earth we must go back not 
six thousand, but millions probably hundreds 
of millions of years; and the earth is young 
compared with the sun and stars. Huxley 
reckons that the production of the carbon- 
iferous or coal formation required six mill- 
ion years. It is estimated that the produc- 
tion of the cretaceous, or chalk, occupied a 
period as long. But the deposit of these two 
formations were but brief steps in the geo- 
logic history of the globe. Sir Archibald 
Geikie claims one hundred million years as 
the minimum time during which there has 
been life on the earth. This agrees with 
the estimate of Sir William Thompson (Lord 
Kelvin). Sir Charles Lyell thinks two hun- 
dred and forty million years are necessary 
for the deposit of all the stratified rocks. 
Helmholtz calculates that the solar system 
has been in existence five hundred million 
years. Thus we see that science and the 
Genesis record lack much of agreeing as to 
the date of the creation both of the earth and 
of the heavenly bodies. 

But these are not all of our scientific diffi- 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 13 


culties. We find in the Genesis account light 
created before the sun; as if there could be 
light without the source of light. Day and 
night are divided from each other before 
there is any sun; as if that were possible. 
The sky is represented (according to the 
belief of the ancient time) as a solid firma- 
ment or dome, separating the waters above 
it from the waters below. Every child to- 
day knows how mistaken is this conception. 
Plants are represented as created before the 
sun; as if vegetation or any form of life 
could exist a moment without the sun’s light 
and heat. The sun is said to have been 
created later than the earth; when science 
teaches us that the sun came into being long 
before the earth, and that the earth is its 
babe. The stars, too, are represented by the 
Genesis writer as made after the earth; when 
we know that the earth is a creature of yes- 
terday compared with most of the stars— 
many of the stars, indeed, being vastly older 
than the sun itself. Plants are represented 
as created long before animals—one on the 
third day and the other not until the fifth. 
Here again science says, No, the evidence is 
very strong that plants and animals came in- 
to existence practically together. 

Thus it appears that the Genesis story 


14 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


breaks down at every point when we attempt 
to regard it as either history or science, that 
is to say, as a record of actual facts. 

What, then, is it? The only answer possi- 
ble to be given in the light of modern knowl- 
edge is the one suggested by the similar crea- 
/ tion stories found among many peoples, a 
few of which have already been noted. It 
is legend, it is myth—as clearly so as are 
the cosmogonies of Greece and India. It is 
an attempt made in an early age by some 
gifted mind, or rather by many minds, to 
answer out of their own thoughts the ques- 
tion which man has been forever asking, 
How did things come to be? This is the 
position now taken by nearly all the leading 
biblical scholars of the world. This is the 
position taken by practically all scientists. 
Regarded as a work of the devout imagina- 
tion the Genesis narrative is interesting and 
valuable. It has been well called “A Poem 
of Creation.” As such it is striking, impres- 
Sive, in parts sublime. But as something to 
be regarded as facts, it no more stands the 
critical tests of our time than would Milton’s 
“Paradise Lost,” if that great work of the 
creative imagination were set up as history 
or science. It is not the story of how God 
did create the earth and the heavens. It is a 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 15 


picture of how some gifted soul or souls of 
the ancient world dreamed that the creative 
process went on. 

So much, then, for the theory, which has so 
long been almost universally accepted in the 
Christian World, that the world was created 
in a limited and fixed time, as set forth in the 
first chapter of Genesis. 

There is one other theory, only one, that 
claims our attention. It is the modern scien- 
tific theory of Evolution. Let us now turn 
to that to see what are the evidences of its 
truth. 

Of course, in the limited space of a single 
chapter, I cannot undertake to detail all or a 
tithe of the evidence which believers in Evo- 
lution claim for the doctrine. Nor is this 
necessary. All I can do—and it is enough— 
will be to indicate something of the character 
of the proofs relied on, in order to show how 
direct and constant is their appeal to fact, 
and therefore how unequivocal and inescapa- 
ble are the conclusions to which they lead. 

Let me begin with suns and planets. Why 
is it believed that the origin of these is by 
evolution? Because we have only to look in- 
to the heavens above us to see the evolution- 
ary process going on. The astronomer by 
means of his telescope and his trained powers 


16 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


of observation is able to discover world-mak- 
ing in every stage of progress. 

Here is a nebula—a vast fiery cloud. What 
is that? Clearly it is world-stuff, or material 
out of which worlds are made. Here is an- 
othey nebula. Condensation has begun at 
one or more points, and perhaps evidence of 
a whirling motion is apparent. What does 
that mean? It means that world-evolution 
is in process. Here is a nebula that has con- 
densed into a great central sun, and from it 
a ring has separated. What is that ring? 
It is the first step toward a planet. Thus it 
is that the telescope, if not the naked eye, 
reveals to us sun-making and planet-making 
in all stages. Could proof be stronger that 
Evolution is the law of the heavens above our 
heads? And if other worlds are formed by 
the process of Evolution, is not the presump- 
tion strong that ours was formed in the same 
way? 

Turn now from the heavens to the earth— 
from astronomy to geology. Here again the 
evolutionist appeals not to hearsay, or dream, 
or guess, but to observed and verified fact. 

How did the solid crust of the earth come 
to be? He examines the crust to see if there 
be not written upon it a record. A wonder- 
ful record he finds—a record inscribed by 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 17 


nature herself, by the hand of her elements 
and forces—fire and water and wind and ice. 
And so he sets himself to reading the record. 
He studies volcanoes, and the effect of heat 
on rocks. He studies stratification, as it is 
going on to-day, and as it reveals its laws to 
him in a thousand ways. He studies the rise 
and subsidence of lands, and the consequent 
changing of sea lines, as these phenomena are 
seen now and are traceable in past ages. He 
studies the laws of erosion, by which moun- 
tains are cut down and carried into the sea, 
and vast river beds are scooped out. He 
studies the action of wind and rain and frost 
and heat in disintegrating rocks and chang- 
ing them into soil. He studies the laws of 
glaciers, and observes how they plane down 
hills and fill up valleys, and carry their enor- 
mous loads of rock and earth half across 
continents. 

He knows that the laws and forces whose 
effects he is studying are constant, and there- 
fore that he holds in his hand the key to the 
past history of the surface of the planet, and 
how it has come to be what he sees it now. 
Change has been ever going on. It has left 
its record everywhere upon the rocks; and 
what is that record? It is Evolution. 

It took a very long time to fit the earth for 


18 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


life, even life of the lowest kinds. But the 
preparation was made, and life came. 

As to how life originated, eivastatsets fs? 
freely confess that they are in ignorance. 
The tendency is to believe that the evolution- 
ary process has suffered no break, and there- 
fore that life was developed somehow from 
the not-living. But this belief is based rather 
upon faith in the uniformity of nature’s 
methods than upon any direct proof. If life 
did come by an evolutionary process from 
the not-living, it was at a time and under 
circumstances such as we know nothing of 
and possibly can know nothing of, and such 
as probably can never be repeated in the 
history of the planet. 

Even if we grant that life at its begin- 
ning was a special creation, everything in- 
dicates that that beginning was so very low 
down and so simple as to form only the 
merest starting-point for a life-history of the 
globe. From that simple beginning (in an 
organic substance probably differing only in 
the slightest possible degree from the inor- 
ganic) it has developed on and up, from the 
lower to the higher, from the simpler to the 
more complex, dividing early into two great 
main streams, vegetable and animal life, then 
dividing and sub-dividing again and again, 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 19 


and ever multiplying and unfolding, until at 
last we have the earth covered with all the 
rich and varied and manifold forms of life 
which appear on its surface and in its waters 
to-day. How do we know that all this won- 
derful evolution of life has gone on? We 
know it by reading the story in nature’s stone 
book, where it is all written down in char- 
acters that cannot possibly be misunderstood. 


Strong arguments in support of the evo- 
lution theory may be deduced from embry- 
ology, morphology, and the geographical dis- 
tribution of organisms. But these I must 
pass over. Enough, however, has been said 
to show the general nature of the evidence on 
which the theory rests. Its appeal is every- 
where not to credulity but to knowledge, not 
to guesses but to the most carefully verified 
facts. 


The theory may be said to have received 
universal acceptance among scientists. Says 
Professor Edwin G. Conklin: 


“The whole scientific world long since was con- 
vinced of the truth of Evolution, and every year which 
has passed since the publication of “The Origin of 
Species, in 1859, has added to the mountain of evidence 
which has been piled up in its favor. . .. There 
is probably not a single biological investigator in the 


20 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


world to-day who is not convinced of the truth of 
Evolution.’ 


It is easy to see that for the men who are 
best qualified to judge of a scientific doctrine 
to have given in their adhesion to Evolution 
with such unanimity, is significant in the 
highest degree. When the new doctrine first 
came on the scene it was virtually without 
a friend. The leaders of scientific opinion 
to whom it made its appeal had all been 
trained in other schools of thought, and came 
to the investigation of the claims of Evolution 
with their prepossessions against it. They 
had believed and taught, and not a few of 
them written books, in support of a different 
theory, which must be relinquished if the 
claims of Darwin were true. Under such cir- 
cumstances it was in the nature of things that 
only proofs which were seen to be of the 
weightiest character could convert them to the 
new doctrine. Yet with very few exceptions 
they were coverted; and as we have seen, 
there is not a scientist of any note living to- 
day who does not accept the evolution theory 
in some form. 

We have now before us, in brief, the two 
theories of the origin of the world, which 
present themselves to modern men asking 


1Evolution and the Bible (1922), p. 6. 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 21 


for acceptance. Is there any question which 
one we must receive, if we are truth-loving, 
and care at all to have our beliefs based on 
realities? 

- And now we come to the important ques- 
tion of the relative religious influence and 
value of the two theories. 

I know the fact that one is ancient and 
venerable, while the other is new, and es- 
pecially the fact that one is contained in the 
Bible, while the other is not, may seem to 
give the greater religious claim to the theory 
of creation found in Genesis. 

And yet is the claim necessarily valid? 
Has God no truth besides that which the 
Bible contains? Rather, if we are not 
atheists, must we not say that all truth is of 
God, whether found on parchment or on 
stone; whether inscribed by pen held by hu- 
man hand, or by wind and rain and ice and 
fire on mountain sides; whether written two 
thousand years ago in Palestine, or to-day on 
the face of the starry sky above our heads, or 
of the earth beneath our feet? 

Men who have never learned to see God, 
anywhere except in the past, are always 
afraid of any new truth that bears upon re- 
ligion. But how faithless and God-dishonor- 
ing is such a fear! Is God a God of the 


22 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


past only? Are his revelations ended? Is 
there to be progress in everything else con- 
nected with man’s life except that which is 
highest of all, the moral and spiritual? With- 
out the opening of eyes to new truth in re- 
ligion, where would have been the Protestant 
Reformation? Where would have been Chris- 
tianity itself? Where would have been any 
of the great forward movements which have 
quickened and enlarged the world’s religious 
thought and life? 

The foundations of religion are not in a 
book. They are rather in the soul of man. 
And if they are in the soul of man, the ac- 
ceptance of ‘the belief that God’s creation is 
perennial, continuous, eternal, cannot dis- 
turb them, or do anything except deepen and 
strengthen them. 

It is asserted by some that Evolution is 
atheistic; that it puts God out of the uni- 
verse, and leaves us only law instead. True, 
there are possible forms of the evolution 
theory which are atheistic, which push God 
one side, and give us only law. But there are 
other forms of it which are profoundly 
theistic—which fill the universe full of God, 
as no other theory known to man does, cer- 
tainly far more than the Genesis theory it- 
self does. That makes him a creator from 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 23 


without. This makes him a creator within 
—his creative power operates in all things 
from atom to sun. That makes him a creator 
of the world, once; then he withdraws, and 
so far as creative function is concerned, is 
forever thereafter an absentee God. This 
makes him a creative intelligence and power 
that never sleeps and never withdraws from - 
any atom of his universe. 


“The world is the ring of his spells, 
The play of his miracles. 

Ever fresh the broad creation, 

A divine improvisation, 

From the heart of God proceeds, 
A single will, a million deeds. 


“He is the axis of each star, 

He is the sparkle of each spar, 

He is the heart of every creature, 

He is the meaning of each feature; 

And his mind is in the sky 

Than all it holds more deep, more high.” 


Thus it is that the doctrine of Evolution! 
ought to fill, and rightly understood does fill, 
all the universe with God, as the meaning,’ 
and the ever-living, never-sleeping creative 
power of it all. 

As to the fear that Evolution will dethrone 


God because it enthrones law—what is law? 


24 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


What can it be but the sign and manifesta- 
tion of One without whom law could not 
exist? Is law a Power? Rather is it the path 
along which a power—the Eternal Power— 
marches to the attainment of its great: ends. 
“God is law, say the wise, O soul, and let us rejoice; 
For if he thunder by law, the thunder is yet His 
voice.” 


Men who cling to the old and are afraid 
of the new talk eloquently about the Genesis 
story of the creation of the world being a 
“revelation” of God. And because it is a 
revelation we are told it must be true. But 
how is it a revelation? The claim is quite 
incorrect. In truth, it is in Evolution that we 
have a revelation of God; in all previous 
theories of creation we have had only asser- 
tions of God. What does the Genesis story 
do? It asserts; it asserts that God at a cer- 
tain time did so and so. It shows us nothing. 
It uncovers nothing. It reveals nothing. 
(To reveal is to show or to uncover.) What 
does Evolution do? It uncovers facts of 
nature. It shows us God actually doing. It 
exhibits the divine creative work going on 
_before our eyes, in the past and in the pres- 
ent. Thus God is not simply asserted as a 
creator, but he is revealed as a creator. 
Which, then, brings God nearer to us and 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD 25 


makes him more real and certain, the old or 
the new? 

Tell me the story of Michael Angelo and 
his great art creations, and you do much. 
But take me into Michael Angelo’s studio, 
and let me see the great master’s tools, his 
plans, his unfinished sketches, his work act- 
ually going forward, and you do vastly more. 
Is it not clear how this applies to the two 
creation theories? The old creation theory 
talks to me about the supreme World-Artist 
—tells me a story as to what he did once on 
a time in a far distant past. The new 
thought of creation by Evolution takes me 
by the hand and leads me into the great 
Artist’s world-studio, universe-studio, amidst 
his tools of nature-forces and laws, his de- 
signs of plants and animals and worlds, his 
work done and being done, of life-building 
and universe-building and man-building, and 
thus reveals him, and brings him nearer to 
me, and lets me see him, feel him, touch him, 
know him, as the other never did and never 
can. 

Men talk about the doctrine of Evolution 
being irreligious. What a strange use of 
words. Is it irreligious to enlarge the sphere 
of God’s power and work from a narrow and 
circumscribed earth to a boundless universe? 


26 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 


Is it irreligious to extend the time of his 
creative activity from six days to ages with- 
out beginning and without end? Is it irre- 
ligious to transform our thought of a creator 
from that of a powerful mechanic, or potter, 
operating in one limited place, to that of a 
Divine Spirit quickening and giving life to 
his children and his worlds everywhere? 

No, it will be seen some day that the 
thought of Evolution, fully comprehended 
in its meanings and its bearings, is a mighty 
enlarger and exalter of religion, a mighty dig- 
nifier and ennobler of man, a mighty revealer 
and glorifier of God. 

When will men learn that God is the God 
of the living, not of the dead? When will 
they learn that the eternal ages are in his 
hand? When will they discover that the 
mighty laws and forces by which the world 
moves on to its great destiny, are his? When 
will they be wise enough to cease fighting or 
fearing the great new revelations of his 
truth in nature and in man, by which he is 
rolling the world on into the light? 


CHAPTER II 
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 


IN the preceding chapter we found two 
theories of the origin of the world offering 
themselves for our choice—only two; namely, 
the theory of creation by sudden fiat, found 
in the book of Genesis, and the modern 
scientific theory of Evolution. As soon as 
we pass to the subject of the origin of man, 
we find the same two theories presenting 
themselves for our choice again. Was man 
created at a given fixed time, from the dust 
of the ground, as the Genesis story repre- 
sents? Or did he, as well as the world in 
which he lives, come into being by an evolu- 
tionary process? 

Let us first examine the Genesis story, and 
see what claim that offers for our credence. 

As I have already pointed out, the book of 
Genesis gives two different and conflicting 
accounts of man’s creation. According to 
the first account, all other things are made 
before man; man is made last. According to 
the second account, as given in our common 
English version, the order of creation is as 


28 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


follows: first, the earth and heavens; second, 
plants and herbs (made, but not planted in 
the ground); third, man; fourth, a garden 
(from the soil of which trees are made to 
grow); fifth, all beasts and birds;. sixth, 
woman. According to the first account, man 
and woman are created at the same time, and 
presumably out of the same material. Ac- 
cording to the second account, they are 
created at different times, and out of very 
different material. In other words, man is 
created early, out of the dust of the ground, 
after which he is left a long time alone, his 
only companions being the beasts of the field. 
Then the Lord causes a deep sleep to fall 
upon him and while he sleeps, his side is 
opened, a rib is taken out, and from this is 
made a woman, to be a helpmeet for him. 
Then follows the story of the Paradise 
Garden, with its tree of forbidden fruit, of 
which Adam and Eve, tempted by a talking 
serpent, eat, and as a consequence are driven 
out. For their disobedience the sentence is 
pronounced upon the serpent that henceforth 
it shall go on its belly (as if it had walked 
upright before), and it shall eat dirt; upon 
the woman the sentence is pronounced that 
she shall bear children in labor and sorrow, 
and shall be in subjection to her husband; the 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 29 


man is sentenced to labor for his bread, and 
the earth is cursed for his sake and made to 
bring forth thorns and briars from this time 
on; and death, which we are given to under- 
stand was not in the world before, and would 
not otherwise have entered, is now made the 
doom of the human family. Then Adam and 
Eve are driven from Paradise, to become the 
parents of a fallen, sinning, suffering, lost 
race. Thus the plan of the Creator for a 
good world, filled with virtue and happiness, 
is broken down and destroyed at its very 
inception. 

What shall we say of this story? 

If we found that the Genesis narrative of 
the creation of the world must be set down 
as legend or myth or poetry, even more does 
it seem that this of the creation of man must 
be set down as the same. Why? Because 
all its marks appear to be marks of the leg- 
endary, not of the historic; of the imaginary, 
not of the real. 

In the real world serpents do not talk. 
They have never walked upright, but have 
always crawled on the ground as they do 
now. Serpents do not live on dirt as food, 
and never have. The world brought forth 
thorns and briars long, long before man 
arrived upon the scene. Death did not begin 


30 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


with Adam. It has been in the world untold 
ages—indeed ever since life appeared upon 
the planet. Death was a necessity if man or 
any animal was to have an organized physical 
body. To sing, as Milton does, of 
“the fruit 

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste 

Brought death into our world and ali our woe,” 
may be admissible for a poet, but it has no 
relation to fact. It is a mistake to think of 
labor as a curse. Excessive labor is a curse— 
as excessive anything else is; but labor in 
itself is a great blessing. As to the subjection 
of woman to man, it has to be confessed that 
there has been a great deal too much of such 
slavery in all ages of the world; but it is not 
a necessary condition of things, and certainly 
it is not one which we have a right to charge 
upon God as his decree. That woman was 
created out of a rib of man, there is no’ 
reason whatever to believe. Every scientist 
will deny the possibility of such a thing. How- 
ever man was created, woman was certainly 
created in the same way. Nothing could be 
more unhistoric and unscientific in its very 
nature than the whole Genesis story of the 
creation of man and woman, and of the events 
connected with it. Everywhere in the story 
there are clear marks of legend, of myth, of 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 31 


the imagination; nowhere do we find marks 
of historic fact. 

One of the greatest difficulties connected 
with the Genesis story of the creation of man 
is found in the matter of time. It has already 
been shown that the age of the world must be 
accepted, not as the six thousand years which 
the Bible record allows, but as millions, per- 
haps hundreds of millions, of years. The time 
during which man has been in existence is of 
course short compared with the whole period 
since the creation of the earth, and yet it is 
vastly longer than the biblical record con- 
templates. 

Assyriologists have been for some time in 
possession of definite records showing that 
a powerful kingdom, under the rule of Sargon 
I and his son Naram-Sin, existed in the 
Valley of the Kuphrates, and extended as far 
as the Mediterranean Sea on the west, at as 
early a date as 8750 or 3800 years before 
Christ. This is many centuries before Noah’s 
flood, and within two centuries of the creation 
of the world and of the first man, if we are 
to take the common Bible chronology. Pro- 
fessor McCurdy, in his scholarly and candid 
work, “History, Prophecy, and the Monu- 
ments,” places the date of the founding of 
the cities of Erech and Ur, in Babylonia, at 


32 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


5000 years B. C., and the date of the first 
agricultural settlements in the lower Eu- 
phrates valley at 7000 B. c. Professor Hil- 
precht, of the University of Pennsylvania, 
who has been connected with some of the 
most fruitful excavations, at Nippon and 
elsewhere, that have been made in recent 
years, has found writings on clay tablets 
which he claims cannot be of a date later 
than 6000 B. c., and he is of the opinion that 
the development of such a system of writing 
as was used could not have taken place in 
less than three thousand years. This would 
carry us back to 9000 B. c., or a time five 
thousand years earlier than the date of the 
creation printed in the margin of our Bibles. 

Turning from the valley of the Euphrates 
to the valley of the Nile, what do we find? 
The earliest reliable Egyptian history may 
be said to begin with Menes, the first king 
who united the different provinces of Egypt 
into an empire. What is the date of Menes? | 
Broeck says 5702 B.c.; Unger 5613, Mari- 
ette, 5004; Brugsch, 4455. The weight of 
authority fixes it at 5000 B.c. or earlier. 
But that was not the beginning of human life 
in Egypt. At that time there was an ad- 
vanced civilization. In various parts of 
Egypt pottery and flint implements have been 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 33 


discovered, coming from peoples inhabiting 
the Nile valley long before the civilized 
Egyptians had an _ existence. Professor 
Flinders Petrie (and there is no _ higher 
authority) says that these discoveries take 
us back at least nine thousand years, and 
perhaps very much farther. Maspero, in his 
great work, “The Dawn of Civilization: 
Egypt and Chaldea,” says that civilization 
in the Nile valley is at least fifteen thousand 
years old; and he believes the culture of 
Babylonia to have been earlier still. 

The time required for the development of 
the languages of the world also takes us back 
very far. Professor McCurdy says it is im- 
possible to believe that the Arabic language, 
the oldest of the Semitic tongues, had its 
origin less than fifteen thousand years ago. 
But probably Semitic in all its forms is com- 
paratively recent. There is reason to believe 
that man existed vast periods of time before 
any of the languages now known had their 
birth. 

It is not, however, until we go to geology 
that we get the earliest traces of man. These 
traces are in the form of teeth, skulls, or 
other human bones, and especially of imple- 
ments of various kinds, crudely shaped out of 
flint or other hard stone. Such traces have 


34 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


been discovered in England, in nearly all 
parts of western, central, and southern 
Europe, in northern Africa, in western and 
southern Asia, and in various places in 
America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
And in many places they are found in such 
circumstances that by means of deposits 
formed above them, or alteration of sea or 
land levels, or other geological changes that 
have taken place since they were buried, it 
is possible to ascertain with considerable cer- 
tainty their age. They go back far into the 
glacial epoch, if not to preglacial times. The 
northwest of Europe seems to have been 
peopled with these early men for thousands 
of years. At that time the climate was sub- 
tropical. Such flora as we now see in Italy 
and northern Africa extended nearly up to the 
arctic circle, and the elephant, the hyena, and 
the leopard lived in Britain, which was at 
that time joined to the mainland of Europe. 
Then came great glaciers which pushed their 
ice-mantles down far into Germany in 
Europe, and to Philadelphia in America. At 
the close of this period (or these periods) 
of cold and ice, the earliest men, sometimes 
known as Drift-men, had disappeared, and 
another race known as the Cave-men had 
taken their place. How far back does this 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 35 


carry the earliest traces we have of man? 
Very conservative estimates say from fifty 
thousand to one hundred thousand years. 
Quatrefages says one hundred thousand 
years. Professor F. W. Putnam thinks the 
evidence clear that early man in North 
America was contemporary with the mam- 
moth. Dr. Draper says it is difficult to assign 
to the beginning of the glacial epoch a later 
date than a quarter of a million years ago. 
Mr. Croll, from his astronomical calculations, 
puts it at two hundred and forty thousand 
years ago. Mr. John Fiske, after making a 
careful and extended examination of the evi- 
dence bearing on the subject, agrees with 
Mr. Croll. The dates assigned to the Cro- 
Magnon Man, the Neanderthal Man and the 
Ape-Man of Java are respectively 25,000 
years, 25,000 to 40,000 years, and 500,000 
years. 

Another thing about primitive man is as 
important as his early origin. It is his con- 
dition. What do we find the first human 
being to be? Is he a perfect man, living in a 
Paradise? And are we to regard all his 
subsequent condition on the earth as fallen 
and degenerate, compared with his first 
state? 

On the contrary, we find the earliest man 


36 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


to be very low down in every way, lacking 
even the rudiments of civilization, without 
house, or arts, or clothing, or fire—in mode 
of life or power over nature hardly above the 
beasts, and with a skull nearer to that of the 
anthropoid apes than to the skull of the civil- 
ized man of to-day. The change that has 
taken place in his condition since the far- 
away time when we first get trace of him 
has been one, not of degeneration, but of 
marvelous progress. 

So, then, our inquiries as to how long man 
has been in existence, and what was his con- 
dition when we first discover him, bring us 
two results: first, they show us, beyond all 
possibility of question, that the Genesis 
stories of his creation and fall are legendary 
and not historic; and second, they prepare 
the way for the evolutionist’s theory of man’s 
origin, and go far toward compelling us to 
accept that theory. If Evolution is true, 
where ought we to find our first traces of 
man? Far back in the past, somewhere near 
where we do find them. If Evolution is true, 
what ought man’s condition to be when we 
first discover him? Just what we do find it 
—a condition only a little above that of some 
other forms of animal life. 

Now to these facts, add the facts, still more 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 37 


significant, brought to light by the compara- 
tive anatomist, showing the close connection 
of man’s body structurally with the animals 
below him. Says Professor Le Conte: 


“Tt is impossible to exaggerate the closeness be- 
tween man’s body and the animal kingdom from 
a structural point of view. . .. Man’s body is 
identified with the body of all animals in its func- 
tions; with all vertebrates, especially mammals, in 
its structure. Bone for bone, muscle for muscle, 
ganglion for ganglion, almost nerve-fibre for nerve- 
fibre, his body corresponds with that of the higher 
animals. Whether he was derived from such ani- 
mals or not, certain it is that his structure, even in 
the minutest details, is precisely such as it would be 
if he were thus derived by successive slight mod- 
ifications,’’! 

“All the back-boned mammals are constructed on 
one general pattern; man, monkey, deer, horse, 
whale, are all outgrowths of one idea—two pairs of 
limbs joined to a skelton that has within it a battery 
of nerves, and at one end of the column a collo- 
cation of nerves in a bony case, serving as a seat of 
sensation and dominant perception. Man simply has 
a larger brain, and his forelimbs free, while he rises 
to walk on two feet.’ 


Note, with the rest, the remarkable fact 
that the embryo of the human infant in its 
development actually passes through stages 
of close_similarity to every successive form 


1 Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 287. 
2 E. P. Powell, Heredity from God, p. 151. 


38 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


of animal life—beginning with the lowest 
and simplest, and advancing up through re- 
semblance to those of fish, reptiles, birds, 
lower mammals, last of all apes, then the true 
human. What a suggestion have we here 
that man’s life-path on the earth has been a 
development up through all the lower forms; 
and that this embryo development in every 
individual human being is nature’s way of 
remembering the long path the race has 
travelled to reach its present place at the top 
of the ladder of the world’s physical life! — 

It is very suggestive, too, that “the human 
being who degenerates moves directly back 
towards the ape in form. The idiot has a 
retreating forehead, prominent teeth, claw- 
like hands, and sometimes even a hairy body. 
His language is an ape-like chatter, and his 
anger a scream, almost exactly that of a. 
monkey in the forest. | 

“The case is not different with wild races. 
Their foreheads are retreating; their bodies © 
covered with hair; their language simian; 
their eyebrows flexible, and eyes restless; 
abdomen protruding, and arms longer in pro- 
portion than any civilized races.” 

Thus the lower down we go, and the 
farther back, the nearer we find man approx- 
imating the forms of animal life below him. 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 39 


Now put all these lines of evidence together 
(and there are many more that I cannot even 
touch), and it is very plain why scientists 
have come to hold with almost absolute 
unanimity that physical man, at least, is the 
result of an evolutionary process from lower 
forms of animal existence. 

Nor is the evolution believed to be confined 
to the physical. It seems to extend to the 
psychical also. 

There is hardly a mental faculty in man 
that is not found, at least in germ, in the 
lower animals. Stories of the intelligence of 
animals might easily be told by the hour. 
Horses have been trained to perform remark- 
able feats, involving counting, and much else. 
Sir John Lubbock taught his dog to read— 
that is, to distinguish printed words from 
each other, bringing a card containing the 
word ‘“‘water’” when he wanted to drink, one 
- containing the word “meat” when he wanted 
food, and so on. 

It seems plain that animals may be taught 
right and wrong. A dog will often show by 
his actions as plainly as words could speak it, 
that he is conscious that he has done some 
wrong thing, and is ashamed of it. 

Fidelity is often manifested by animals in 
a very high degree. A family went away 


40 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION - 


from home leaving their dog shut up in the 
cellar, to remain there during their absence. 
They carried to him before their departure 
a piece of meat for his food during the time. 
On returning, in ten days or so, they found 
the dog dead, starved to death, and the meat 
by his side untouched. He had been accus- 
tomed to watching meat, and other things, 
and evidently had understood that this meat 
was given him to watch. So he died rather 
than disobey or be unfaithful to his trust. 
The affection of animals is often very deep 
and strong. Any one who has seen Land- 
seer’s touching and powerful picture, “‘The 
Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner,” will never 
doubt this. In the city of Edinburgh, Scot- 
land, they show travellers a monument which 
the people there erected some years ago to 
a dog. The dog’s master had died. The dog 
followed the lifeless form to the grave and 
would not go away. No inducement could 
draw him from the sacred spot where his — 
master lay. By and by a butcher in the 
neighborhood took pity on him and fed him. 
At last the dog so far yielded as to go once 
a day at a certain hour to the shop of the 
friendly butcher, to get his allowance; but 
no sooner was he through eating then he 
would return again to his charge. And he 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 4] 


passed the rest of his life—some years— 
guarding the grave of the one he loved. So 
touched were the people of the neighborhood 
by such affection that when the dog died they 
joined, rich and poor together, in building 
him a monument. 

These illustrations show how closely con- 
nected we are with the forms of life below 
us, both on the physical, and on the psychical 
sides. Psychical evolution is much more mys- 
terious and difficult to explain than evolution 
of the body, but everything indicates that 
evolution is the law, not of one half, but of 
the whole of man’s nature. 

I do not wish to be misunderstood by this 
to contend that there is little difference be- 
tween man and the lower animals, or no 
difference except in degree. Evolution as 
expounded by its greatest masters does not 
teach this. It teaches that there are deep 
-and radical differences. Let us note what 
some of them are. 

First, there are differences in bodily struc- 
ture, which are of immense significance. Man 
stands upright, as no brute does. Thus he is 
by nature a forward looker and an upward 
looker. This has vast consequences. Yet 
this upright position has been attained by 
an evolutionary process. He has a true hand 


42 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


—something which no animal below him pos- 


‘ gesses. The hand is the most wonderful of 


mechanical instruments, and itself goes far 
toward giving man dominance over all other 
creatures. Yet his hand is simply the highest 
and most perfect form of that development 
which has given the fish its fins and the quad- 
ruped its forepaws. Man has a brain which 
by its capacity and quality crowns him king 
of the world. Yet everything shows that his 
brain has developed and enlarged and grown 
complex and superior to all other brains by 
degrees and through long use. vs 
Some have held that the radical difference 
between man and the lower animals is found 
in language. And it must be confessed that 
the difference here is very great. No animal 
below man has developed a real language. 
But we must go to mind before we find the 
deepest distinction of all. It is man’s mind 
that makes him king and lord over all other 
created beings on earth. | 
And yet even this does not make the dis- 
tinction quite clear. We must ask where in 
mind does the essential difference lie, since 
certain mental qualities, and even germs of 
qualities which we may call moral, we have 
already discovered in brute animals. 
Nearly all the most competent investiga- 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 43 


tors agree in drawing the line of distinction 
between the human mind and the brute mind 
at self-consciousness. The lower animals are 
conscious; but we have every reason to be- 
lieve they are not self-conscious. They have 
not become self-centred personalities. This 
is attained only with self-consciousness. In 
the lower animal, there is what we may call 
the anima, or animal soul. But it is incom- 
plete, imperfect, unstable. In man it rises 
to completeness, stability, self-centredness, 
full individuality, personality. Self-con- 
sciouness seems to be the simplest and clear- 
est sign of personality. Its appearance 
among psychic phenomena marks spirit birth. 
We may imagine men to have emerged ever 
so gradually from animals; but in this 
process of gradual development the moment 
he becomes conscious of self, that moment 
the real man is born. The moment he be- 
- comes, not simply conscious, but conscious 
that he ts conscious; the moment he not 
simply knows, but knows that he knows; 
that is to say, the moment he turns his 
thoughts inward in attention and wonder 
upon himself, and on the mystery of his exist- 
ence as separate from nature, that moment 
marks the birth of humanity out of animality. 
All else characteristic of man follows as a 


44 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


necessary consequence. He is now a person, 
a self-acting ego. He has now free-will, and 
real moral responsibility. Out of these grow 
the recognition of relations to other moral 
beings and to God, and therefore ethics and 
religion. Out of these grows, also, the capa- 
city for indefinite voluntary progress. This 
also means full spirit life, and therefore, as I 
believe, immortality.’ 

In the early years of Evolution there used 
to be much talk among its opponents about 
the degradation it puts upon man. But how 
degradation? Are the most developed: and 
the most intelligent of the animals lower 
down than the dust’ of the ground, out of 
which the Genesis story represents Adam as 
created? If we had always been taught that 
God created man by development from the 
highest animals, that would certainly have 
seemed to us a far nobler and less objection- 
able origin than creation out of dirt. Surely, 
if Evolution is true, God has brought us into 
being by the most exalted of all possible 
paths. He has kindled our lives from a 
torch that has been lighted at a well-nigh 
infinite cost—lighted by all the life that has 
been lived on the globe in all the ages past.. 
We are the consummation and crown of the 


1 See Le Conte, p. 302 et seq. 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 45 


life-history of the planet. What conceivable 
origin could be more exalted or honorable 
than this? 

I have sometimes dreamed the wild dream 
of being an eagle, and living an eagle’s life, 
up amidst the storms, the clouds, the moun- 
tain peaks, the lightnings. And again I have 
dreamed of being a deer roaming free in 
the woods; a skylark singing in the clouds; 
a fish in the sea; a lion in the desert; a wild 
horse on the plains; a polar bear on his 
lonely ice fields; a chamois amid the Alps; 
a humming-bird or a butterfly among the 
flowers—and living the different and won- 
derful lives of all these. If Evolution is true, 
these dreams come nearer than I may suppose 
to realization. In me something of the lives 
and natures of all these, and of all forms of 
existence below me, actually survives and 
lives. 

Edwin Markham, in his poem “The Making 
of Abraham Lincoln,” gives striking ex- 
pression to the thought of the vital affinity 
between nature and man. He sees all the 
lower forces of nature gathered up as it were 
into the great President, the great man of the 
people, to make him what he was: 


“The color of the ground was in him, the red earth; 
The tang and color of the primal things— 


46 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


The rectitude and patience of the rocks; 

The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn; 
The courage of the bird that dares the sea; 
The justice of the rain that loves all leaves; 
The pity of the snow that hides all scars; 
The loving kindness of the way-side well;. 
The tolerance and equity of light 

That gives as freely to the shrinking weed 
As to the great oak flaring to the wind— 

To the grave’s low hill as to the Matterhorn 
That shoulders out the sky.” 


We little realize the rich heritage that 
comes to us all from the past. We sometimes 
sing the hymn, ‘Heir of all the ages, I.” All 
the eons of time have been at work shaping 
and fashioning the globe, its mountains, its 
valleys, its continents, its seas, its skies, its 
seasons, its climates, to make it a fit home for 
man. All the life-forces of the globe have 
been busy preparing a life for man. Man 
gathers all the kingdoms of the world up into 
himself. Well may he sing with Boyesen: 


“T am the child of earth and air and sea! 
My lullaby by hoarse silurian storms 
Was chanted: and through endless changing 
forms 
Of plant, and bird, and beast, unceasingly 
The toiling ages wrought to fashion me. 
Lo, these large ancestors have left a breath 
Of their strong souls in mine, defying death, 
And change. I grow and blossom as the tree, 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 47 


And ever feel the deep-delving earthly roots 
Binding me daily to the common clay; 
But with its airy impulse upward shoots 
My life into the realm of light and day. 
And thou, O sea, stern mother of my soul, 
Thy tempests sing in me, thy billows roll. 
Within the rose a pulse that answered mine 
(Though hushed and silently its life-tide ran) 
I oft have felt; but when with joy divine 
I hear the song thrush warbling in my brain, 
I glory in this vast creation’s chain.” 


So inconceivably splendid a heritage, pre- 
pared by the marvellous and unsleeping ev- 
olution of the past, do we all find awaiting us, 
when we arrive on the earthly scene. 

Man degraded by evolution? No poet’s 
fancy ever dreamed such exaltation for man 
as science in our day, in the light of Evolu- 
tion, is declaring to be verified fact. Well 
may Emerson exclaim: “O rich and various 
Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying 
in thy senses the morning and the night and 
the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the 
geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, 
the bower of love and the realm of right and 
wrong! An individual man is a fruit which 
it cost all the foregoing ages to form and 
ripen. A cultivated man, wise to know and 
bold to perform, is the end to which Nature 
works, and the education of the will is the 


48 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


flowering and result of all geology and as- 
tronomy.”’ | 

The doubter says, “Yes, all this sounds 
very well; but in fact it is hollow and empty, 
because there is no God in it.” No God in 
it? What is Evolution? Perhaps no better 
or more widely accepted definition has been 
given than this: “Evolution is continuous, 
progressive change according to definite laws 
and by means of resident forces.” But what 
are laws, if they are not the methods of 
operation of God, the Infinite Wisdom and 
Power? And what are resident forces, but 
God the Infinite and Eternal Energy at the 
heart of all things? To talk of Evolution 
without God is like talking of wind without 


‘Jt 


air, waves without a sea, light without the we 


sun or the ether, effect without cause. The 
truth is, no other conception that ever enter- 
ed into the mind of man is so full of God as 
Evolution. You cannot find a pin-point of 
all the eternity-long and universe-wide ev- 
olutionary process where God is not. Not 
until you can expel law from Evolution, and 
resident forces from Evolution, can you ex- 
pel God from Evolution. 

Too much emphasis cannot be placed upon 
the fact that the creation of man is not yet 
completed. As Tennyson sings: 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 49 


“Where is one that, born of woman, altogether can 
escape 

From the lower world within him, moods of tiger 
or of ape? 


Man as yet is being made, and, ere the crowning 
Age of ages, 

Shall not xon after won pass, and touch him into 
shape? 


All about him shadow still; but, while the races 
flower and fade, 

Prophet eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on 
the shade, 


Till the peoples all are one, all their voices blend 
in choric 

Hallelujah to the Maker, ‘It is finished! Man is 
made!’ ” 


I have already pointed out that worlds are in 
process of creation in the heavens above us, 
and that on the earth also the creative 
_ process is still going forward on a vast scale. 
So man is not yet fully man. He is only in 
the process of being created. Even his body 
has not reached anything like that perfection 
of health and strength, and that degree of 
longevity, which it ought to reach, and will! 
reach sometime, when he learns to obey the 
holy laws of life and health which wrap him 
about. 

But still further below the possibilities of 


50 EVOLUTION AND RKELIGION 


his nature does he fall in things intellectual 
and especially moral. Here what poor, poor 
fragments of men the best of us are! Our 
faculties are only half formed. Our char- 
acters are scarcely more than the embryo of 
what they ought to be. In so many respects . 
we are only babes where we ought to be men! 
We look upon the savage with pity, and ex- 
claim, “How far the development process 
must go on before he can reach full civiliza- 
tion or full manhood!” But how far are 
most of us from full civilization, judged by 
any worthy standards! And how very far 
from manhood at its best, even such manhood 
as has been exemplified in many actual lives! 
Our true work in the world is that of co- 
operating with one another, and all good men, 
and all regenerating forces around us, and 
with God, to carry on and ever on the work 
of spiritual creation, in ourselves, in society, 
and in the world. It is the work of strug- 
gling upward by every means in our power, 
and helping others to do the same, from the 
brute beast, which is our starting-point, to- 
ward the angel, the free, pure, strong son of 
God, which is our goal. 

Evolution opens up a wholly new outlook 
for mankind. It antagonizes the old theology 
at almost every point; but most does it an- 


THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 51 


tagonize it in connection with the doctrine 
of the fall of the race in Adam. That dark, 
horrible nightmare of the Christian world 
it sweeps utterly away, replacing it with a 
faith as full of light and hope as it is possible 
for man to conceive. 

If man came into the world by an ev- 
olutionary process from lower forms of life, 
and as long ago as science indicates, then 
there was no such Adam as the Genesis leg- 
end portrays, and consequently no serpent 
and no fall. What have we instead? Ev- 
olution gives us a world unfallen. It gives 
us a race which has been rising, with stand- 
stills and even set-backs here and there, yet 
on the whole rising, from the beginning until 
now, and which is rising still. It places Eden 
not in the past, but in the future—before 
man as an ideal and a goal, to beckon him 
on to forever better things. Instead of a 
plan of God for the world which broke down 
in the first act, and required to be mended as 
best it might be, by a scheme for saving a 
remnant of the race from the world-wreck, 
Evolution gives us a divine plan which has 
never been thwarted and never can be, but 
which is marching on through the ages with 
ever enlarging results of good to all man- 
kind. 


52 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


“The rise, not the fall, of the race is the wholesome 
belief of to-day. 

Onward and upward, from darkness to light, from 
the slime of the past, 

From the animal heritage slowly yet surely emerg- 
ing at last, 

From the cave, from the chase, into fostering home, 
from war into peace, 

From tribes into nations, where law and religion 
and knowledge increase, 

Where in commerce, in culture of fields and of 
flocks, in art and in song, 

In faith and in fellowship blended, in justice and 
hatred of wrong, 

All agencies, human, divine, with gathering wisdom 
unite 

To lift the dim ages beyond their past into glory 
and light, 

Till the nations are born in the power of a heavenly 
birth, 

And the kingdom of God descends and embraces 
the ends of the earth.” 


Such is the modern doctrine of Evolution 
in its bearing upon man’s nature and destiny, 
as contrasted with the old theological doc- 
trine of a fallen race. The old is a doctrine 
of despair; the new is a doctrine of infinite 
hope. The old faces men to the past, the 
new faces men to the future. The old tells 
the world of a Paradise lost, the new sings 
forever of a Paradise to be gained. Judge, 
then, which is the more honoring to God; and 
judge which is the more worthy of accept- 
ance by thoughtful and reverent minds. 


CHAPTER III 
THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 


WE have thus far found both the world and 
man coming into existence by the process of 
Evolution. If we could carry on our study 
so as to make it cover man’s history on the 
earth, we should find the law of Evolution 
applying to nearly or quite all of that history. 
Man’s first dwelling was a cave, his next was 
a rude hut of unhewn stones or of bark. 
From such low and rude beginnings have 
come the palaces and homes of to-day. 

Man’s first clothing was probably leaves, 
grasses, and skins of animals. Everything 
better has been reached by a slow, gradual, 
evolutionary process. 

At first man’s food was doubtless eaten 
raw. It was a great event in his onward 
career when he learned to kindle and to make 
use of fire. From this beginning came the 
evolution, through thousands of years, of the 
art of cooking. 

Man’s first weapons for hunting and war 
were doubtless stones and clubs; from these 
the path has been a very long one to the 


54 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


hunting-rifle and the machine-gun of to-day. 
Tools and utensils of all kinds have come into 
existence by a very slow and gradual process. 
Primitive agriculture was only digging the 
earth with a stick in favorable spots, and 
dropping in seeds to take care of themselves. 

The family and the domestic relations of 
men have been a development. So have 
government, civil society, and the State. The 
origin of speech was doubtless gradual, and 
the history of every language reveals con- 
stant change, usually growth. It took man 
thousands of years to invent an alphabet. 
Mathematics has been an evolution; so has 
been art; so all the sciences. Indeed every- 
thing pertaining to man and civilization in 
the world finds its place under the law of 
Evolution, with one possible exception. What 
is that? It is religion. 

There are those who would draw a line at 
religion, and say, ‘‘Here Evolution cannot be 
admitted. Religion is something sui generis, 
special, miraculous. To give religion a place 
in the natural order is to destroy it.” 

This is the question which I purpose now 
to take up. Shall we give religion a place 
in the evolutionary process? If not, why not? 
If so, what is the effect? Is religion thereby 
destroyed? Is itinjured? On the other hand, 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION sts) 


by being put thus into harmony with the rest 
of man’s life, is it not given new dignity 
and credibility? Is it not thus made more 
certainly a part of the great divine order? 

Religion must have come into the world 
either naturally and by an evolutionary proc- 
cess, as art came, and knowledge, and lan- 
guage, and civilization, and man himself, or it 
must have come suddenly, at some given time, 
and in some miraculous, supernatural way, 
unlike anything else. 

If we claim that it came at some fixed 
time and miraculously, in what direction shall 
we look to find the time, the place, and the 
source? 

Many answer by pointing to the Bible. 
But why to the Bible, rather than to some 
of the other great sacred books of the world? 
If we were in India and inquired for the 
source of religion, we should be pointed just 
as confidently to the Vedas and the Shastyras, 
as we are pointed in this country to the Old 
and New Testaments. If we were among the 
Parsees we should be pointed just as con- 
fidently to the writings of Zoroaster; or 
among the Mohammedans, to the Koran of 
Mahomet. But from all these claims that 
the source of religion is in sacred books other 
than our own, we instantly dissent. Do we 


56 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


dissent with any clearer or stronger reasons 
for so doing, than the Hindu, the Parsee, or 
the Mohammedan dissents from our claim? 
Is it not probable that all of us make our 
respective claims for our own sacred book 
rather as the result of our own natural preju- 
dices than of intelligence on the subject? If 
we could get rid of the bias which education 
and environment have given us, and see things 
as they really are, we should discover that 
religion cannot have its source in any book. 
A book may be a valuable conserver, but it 
cannot be a creator. It may be a reservoir of 
religious knowledge and thought, and as such 
very important; but to find the fountain, 
must we not go to the human soul, where 
alone God ever reveals himself first-hand? 
The Bible nowhere claims that it is the source 
of religion. On the contrary, it makes it 
very plain that religion long preceded the 
Bible. Not only was there religion among the 
Jewish people before any part of the Bible 
was written, but there was religion all around 
about Palestine, much of which was recog- 
nized by the biblical writers as true and good. 

It is by no means certain that Job was a 
Jew, and yet he is counted among the Old 
Testament worthies, and the Book of Job has 
an honored place in the Bible. Balaam was 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 57 


not a Jew; he came from the far East, prob- 
ably from beyond the Euphrates; and yet he 
is set down as a true prophet of God. Ruth, 
who occupies an honored place among the 
ancestors of David and Jesus, was a Moabi- 
tess, nota Jew. Melchizedek, one of the most 
exalted characters of the Old Testament, who 
is represented as a priest of the most high 
God, and to whom even Abraham looked up 
as a superior, seems not to have been a Jew. 
Jesus said of the Roman centurion that he 
had “not found so great faith, no, not in 
Israel.”’ Instead of true religion being con- 
fined to the Jews, Jesus declared: ‘‘Many 
shall come from the East and West, and shal! 
sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob 
in the kingdom of heaven.” Paul told the 
Greeks at Athens that they were “very de- 
vout,” and quoted with approval a religious 
utterance of one of their poets. At Lystra 
he declared that God “hath not left himself 
without witness” among any people. Peter 
declared to the Roman Cornelius, “In every 
nation he that feareth God and worketh 
righteousness is accepted with him.” It is 
clear that, according to the Bible itself, re- 
ligion—and religion which is true and ac- 
ceptable to God—is not confined to the 
Jewish people, or to the Old or New Testa- 


58 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


ment scriptures, or even to persons who 
received their religious instruction from 
these scriptures. The teaching of the Bible 
is essentially the same as that which has 
been so well expressed by Whittier: 


“All souls that struggle and aspire, 
All hearts of prayer by Thee are lit; 

And, dim or clear, thy tongues of fire 
On dusky tribes and twilight centuries sit. 

Nor bounds, nor clime, nor creed Thou know’st, 
Wide as man’s need Thy favors fall; 

The white wings of the Holy Ghost 
Stoop, seen or unseen, o’er the heads of all.” . 


There are those who assert that God made 
a primitive revelation to Adam and Eve in 
the Garden of Eden, and that whatever true 
religion there was or is in the world, previous 
to or outside of Judaism and Christianity, 
came through that. But we have only to 
read the Garden of Eden story to see that 
nothing whatever is said there of any such 
primitive revelation. The theory is a pure: 
invention of a later time. Moreover, how 
could such a revelation have been made to 
a pair of children who did not know good 
from evil? Or, if it had been made, how 
could it have been handed down? But the ob- 
jection which makes every other superfluous, 
is the fact which I have already demonstrat- 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 59 


ed, that there was no Adam, no Eve, and no 
Eden. The Genesis narrative is simply leg- 
end, poetry, a creation of the imagination of 
some devout soul, and not a historic record 
at all. Hence, to found a theory of a prim- 
itive revelation upon it is simply to build an 
edifice upon a dream. 

Where, then, did religion come from? 
Plainly it came into the world with man. It 
is a part of man’s life. It was born out of 
the necessary experiences of his soul. It is 
no more miraculous than is art, or language, 
or thought, or love. Man could not be a man, 
in a world of human and divine relations like 
ours, without being religious. This is God’s 
world. God has made it. He is in it. That 
Eternal Energy which is at the heart of it 
all, the force of its forces, the life of its life, 
the explanation of its law, the soul of its ev-. 
olutionary processes—what can that be, but 
the Eternal God? It is inconceivable that 
man could live for a thousand centuries in 
such a world, where God speaks from every 
blossoming rose, and star of night, and beat 
of human heart, and not be aware, and not 
learn to put the shoes from off his feet in 
the presence of any divine manifestation. 

There is nothing on the earth more natural 
or more inevitable than that men should be 


60 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


worshippers. The statement has sometimes . 
been made that there are tribes, very low 
down, that have no religion. Travellers have 
made this statement. But probably it is a 
mistake. In every case where full investiga- 
tion has been made there have been dis- 
covered germs of what seems to be religious 
thought and feeling. Man recognizes that 
he is not the supreme power in this world. 
He did not place himself here. He can- 
not sustain himself without much help. There 
is something above him. Hence we are not 
surprised to see the rudest savages bowing 
the head in fear, in awe, in worship. It may 
be that what they bow to is only “a stock 
or a stone.” But it represents to their 
childish thought a mystery, a power, some- 
thing higher than themselves. Among savage 
and barbarous peoples religion is necessarily 
crude and superstitious. It rises as man 
rises. Worship becomes more pure as man 
becomes better able to understand God and 
his relations to God. Religious forms change, 
but the religious impulse is permanent. So 
long as man thinks and feels he must wor- 
ship. If he ever ceases to worship he will 
have sunk into a being lower than man. The 
source of religion is not a book, and cannot 
be. It is the heart and conscience of man. 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 61 


It is God in the human soul. 

Many men sigh for miracles as a basis for 
religion. They are sighing for the playthings 
of a child. Man in the child-stage of his 
development identifies God with the strange, 
the unusual, that which is out of the order 
of nature, as if something else could be 
diviner than nature! As man rises toward 
maturity of knowledge and thought, he sees 
that God is in the regular, not in the irregu- 
lar; in the orderly, not in the disorderly. 
God is in law, not in the suspension of law. 
If law could be suspended, it would show 
God absent not present. As Professor Drum- 
mond has well pointed out: 


“Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a 
point here and there for special divine interposition, 
are apt to forget that this virtually excludes God 
from the rest of the process. If God appears peri- 
odically, he disappears periodically. If he comes 
‘upon the scene at special crises, he is absent from 
the scene in the intervals. Whether is all-God 
or occasional-God the nobler theory? The idea of 
an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is 
infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker 
who is the God of the old theology.” 


says Martineau: 


“The customs of heaven ought surely to be more 
sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old 
ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than 


62 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


the strange things which he oe not love well 
enough ever to repeat.” 


Writes Lowell: 


“OQ power, more near my life than life itself, 
If sometimes I must hear good men debate 
Of other witness of Thyself than Thou,— 
As if there needed any help of ours 
To nurse Thy flickering life, that else must cease, 
Blown out as ’twere a candle, by man’s breath,— - 
My soul shall not be taken in their snare, 
To change her inward surety for their doubt, 
Muffled from sight in formal robes of proofs. 
While she can only feel herself through thee, | 
I fear not Thy withdrawal. More I fear, 
Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams 
Of signs and wonders, while unnoticed, Thou, 
Walking Thy garden still, commun’st with men, 
Missed in the commonplace of miracle.” 


Men sigh for a divine revelation full-orbed 
at once—for full knowledge of God and 
Spiritual things from the beginning. They 
are sighing for the impossible. The acorn 
must come before the oak, the babe before 
the man. Growth is the law of the world in 
which we live. If man begins on a low plane 
with other things, he must begin on a low 
plane with religion. Go to a savage, and 
try to teach him high ideas of religion. You 
can no more do it than you can teach him 
high ideas of art, or science, or philosophy. 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 63 


When you have partly civilized him, and 
given him some degree of intelligence about 
other matters, then you may give him ad- 
vanced ideas about religion; not before. So 
that in the nature of the case the only reve- 
lation which it was possible for God to make 
to man, was a gradual and continuous rev- 
elation from low beginnings. That is exactly 
what he has made. The evolution of religion 
in the world has been God’s growing rev- 
elation of the divine to man and in man, as 
man has become capable of recognizing it. 

We shall understand better the real sig- 
nificance of the evolution of religion, if we 
try to get a little clearer conception than 
we have yet done of the beginning from 
which it started. As already intimated, we 
cannot conceive of a time so far back that 
man was not conscious of powers around and 
above him greater than himself, which he 
could not command and on which his life 
more or less depended. Storms beat upon 
him, against which he had little protection; 
the sun shone upon him, now with genial 
warmth, and now with deadly heat; wild 
beasts attacked him and carried away his 
children; floods swept away his habitation 
built on the river bank; the avalanche thun- 
dered down the mountain, destroying without 


64 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


mercy all in its path; the seasons marched 
past him in their order, with their heat and 
their cold, their abundance and their empti- 
ness. Accidents came to him that he could 
not avert, sickness which he could not under- 
stand, and, strangest of all, death, an enemy 
with which he could not cope. 

All these things spoke to him of powers 
mightier than himself, that environed his life, 
and more or less controlled it. As he was 
himself a living being, why were not the run- 
ning river, the restless sea, the sun, the moon, 
the storm, the avalanche, yes, and the tree 
that gave him shelter and food, also living 
beings? With nature all around him so 
wonderful, so mysterious, so full of hidden 
energy, so alive, is it strange if he came 
early to think of all the more striking objects 
of nature as in a sense divinities, or if his 
earliest religion was some form of nature- 
worship? 

But this does not seem to cover the whole 
ground. From still another source early 
peoples seem to have obtained ideas of gods 
and of spirit existence. As men to-day see 
shadows, so did early men. The tree cast its 
shadow. Was not that shadow a second tree, 
a sort of double of the first, a ghost or spirit- 
tree? Men walking in the sun cast shadows. 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 65 


Were not those shadows other selves, spirit- 
selves? Men looking down into still water 
saw images of themselves. Were not those 
images real persons? Men dreamed, and in 
their dreams saw their friends who had been 
long dead. Did not this mean that their 
friends had second selves which did not die? 
Here, clearly, an early basis was laid for a 
belief in spirits. And the ability of these 
spirits to come and go, to appear and to 
vanish, to pass through the earth or the 
water or the air at will, as physical bodies 
could not, seemed to give them a certain 
superiority, and therefore a claim upon man’s 
homage. Something like this appears to be 
the explanation of the origin of that religion 
of spirit-worship, in its various forms of 
animism, fetichism, totemism, polydzemon- 
ism, worship of tutelary deities and of ances- 
tors, which we see among uncivilized races 
at the present time, and which, because we 
see it among uncivilized races to-day, we 
have a right to believe was essentially the 
religion of primitive peoples. 

Of course to early man these spirits and 
nature-powers could have seemed to have 
little relation to one another. Each was 
isolated, each was independent. Each had 
its own habitat or province; generally each 


66 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


was associated with some individual object. 
They might be friendly with one another or 
they might be hostile. Some were very 
powerful. Some were relatively weak. Some 
were good, some were bad. Some were friend- 
ly to man, some were inimical to man. 

Of course the great thing aimed at by the 
worshipper was to avert the anger or gain 
the favor of these spirit powers. He thought 
to do this in many ways, most often by gifts 
of food or other things which he supposed 
the spirits would prize; by making sacrifices, 
sometimes very heavy and painful, even in- 
volving human life; or by incantations, the 
repetition of sacred words, or the perform- 
ance of certain magical rites, which he be- 
lieved would give him power over the spirits. 

Something like this was probably the be- 
ginning of man’s worship and religious life. 
It is difficult to realize how very crude and 
low and poor it was. Out of anything so 
unpromising can there come a religion which © 
will be high, pure, intelligent, ennobling? 
Let us not be faithless. The journey will 
be long, but it will not be so long as more 
than one that Evolution has already seen 
accomplished. If the advances from fire- 
mist to amoeba, and from amoeba, to man, 
have already been achieved, then surely the 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 67 


advance from this low beginning of religion 
to the Sermon on the Mount is not incredible. 
. Let me try to indicate very briefly the 
path along which the evolution of religion in 
the world seems to have moved. As to man’s 
conception of God, it has moved from the 
narrowly local, first to the tribal, then to 
the national, and finally to the universal. 
From that which was very limited in power 
and wisdom, it has moved slowly to that 
which was less and less limited, until at last 
it reached the thought of God as omnipotent 
and omniscient. From diversity it has moved 
ever toward unity; that is, from gods many— 
we may almost say everything a god—it has 
moved steadily toward the thought of God 
as one, over all, through all, and in all. From 
gods without moral character, it has moved 
on and up to a conception which at last en- 
dowed the Divine Nature with the highest 
ethical attributes. Worship, which at first 
was scarcely more than fear, and selfish 
desire for protection and for material advan- 
tage, gradually rose until it became gratitude, 
love, trust, and adoration of the morally 
worthy. 

In other words, religion has developed 
from the lowest and crudest forms of nature 
worship (or worship of spirits identified with 


68 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


natural objects), as seen in animism and 
fetichism, to polytheism, or the thought of 
gods more or less distinct from nature and 
independent; then to higher and higher 
grades of polytheism, in which the gods be- 
came more powerful, wholly anthropomor- 
phic instead of therianthropic, and began to 
gain moral characteristics then from poly- 
theism up to the worship of one God alone, 
but without conceiving of him as universal, 
or denying the existence of other gods; then 
to real monotheism, or the belief that there is 
only one God; and, finally, to ethical mono- 
theism, or ethical theism, or Christianity 
which conceives of God as infinite in power 
and wisdom and possessed of all moral per- 
fections. Thus we have the culmination of 
all in the thought of God as one and holy, 
whose worship is the pure heart, and es- 
pecially in the thought of God as the Univer- 
sal Father, whose worship and whose service 
are love. Higher than this, man’s thought of © 
God, and of man’s relations to God, cannot 
rise. Here is the white summit which kisses 
heaven. 

Now what has caused all this splendid 
growth of man’s conception of the Power 
above him? Has the evolution been an 
accident? It has been no more an accident 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 69 


than man himself has been an accident. It 
has been no more an accident than God is 
an accident. Given a rational mind unfold- 
ing in a universe full of God, as this is, and 
to such a conception of God sooner or later 
it must come, because such a conception is 
true. The universe declares it true, and the 
universe cannot lie. This conception of God 
the universe has written on man’s soul; nay, 
this conception God himself has graven on 
man’s soul, with a graver’s chisel which has 
been nothing less than all man’s experience 
on the earth—experience in the midst of an 
environment from no atom or pulse-beat of 
which God has ever for one moment been 
absent. 

But religion has to do with more than 
man’s relations to God. We live in a world 
of human relations, as well as divine, and 
these too, religion must concern itself with. 
Has there been an evolution here also? 

Plainly yes. Everything shows that man 
began his history in the world with well-nigh 
as imperfect conceptions of his duties and 
relations to his fellow-men, as to God. Just 
emerging as he was from the brute life below 
him, the appetites, propensities, and passions 
which characterized that brute life were 
clinging tightly to him. The long climb 


70 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


which was before him, from the animal to 
the complete man, far off and far up, beyond 
his sight—how long and hard a climb it 
was to be! But he entered upon it. A 
thousand times he fell; but he rose again. 
A thousand times he took the wrong path, 
often wandering far, but at last he found the 
right way once more. Many a time he went 
back, losing precious ground that he had 
gained. But at last his better, stronger, 
diviner self prevailed, and he pressed on 
again. Years passed into centuries, and 
centuries into millenniums; he was still ad- 
vancing; his face was still toward the 
heights. We can now see what he has achieved. 

He has learned something of what right 
means. He has learned something of what 
justice means, and duty and kindness. He is 
beginning to learn not to steal; for if he 
steals from his neighbor, his neighbor will 
steal from him; and thus all his possessions, 
such as he has, become insecure. He is be- 
ginning to learn not to kill, but to respect 
human life—otherwise there is no security 
for his own life. He is beginning to learn, 
by experience long and dearly purchased, that 
truth is better than falsehood. By erperience 
not less long, and much of it not less bitter, 
he is beginning to learn that marriage is 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 71 


better than promiscuity, and chastity than 
unbridled lust. Parental love and love for 
wife and friends have come into his soul. 
They are crude and poor yet, but they are 
clearly there, and they give promise of some- 
thing very beautiful. Germs of pity and 
gentleness, of fidelity and truth, of nobleness 
and honor, and all the high moral qualities 
which will one day make human society a 
kingdom of heaven, are growing within him. 
He is yet far from the angel; but thank God, 
he is also far from the brute. And so he 
struggles on and up, toward the shining goal. 

Such is the evolution of religion on its 
human side. It is only another name for the 
evolution of manhood, the evolution of the 
true and loving home, the evolution of the 
ideal society, the evolution of the just State. 

I asked what caused the evolution of reli- 
gion on its God-ward side. Let us now ask, 
What has caused this that is going forward 
on its side toward man? Has it been an 
accident? Some lines written by one of 
the most distinguished of living American 
scientists shall at least hint an answer: 


“A single thought Divine 

_Holds stars and suns in space. 
A dream of man is Thine, 

And history finds its place. 


72 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


When the universe was young 
Thine was the perfect thought,— 

That life should be bound in one 
By a strand of Love enwrought. 

In the life of the fern and the lily, | 
The dragon and the dove, 

Still through the stress and struggle 
Waxes the bond of Love. 

Out from the ruthless ages 
Rises the incense mild, 

Love of the man and the woman, 
The love of mother and child!” 


Such is the answer of a scientist to whom 
has come a vision of the larger God and the 
deeper meaning of the Universe which the 
thought of Evolution offers. 

Here is a further answer, similar, from a 
preacher, a poet-preacher, whose eyes also are 
open to see the profound and far-reaching 
religious significance of the evolution concep- 
tion: 

“Shy yearnings of the savage, 
Unfolding thought by thought, 
To holy lives are lifted, 
To visions fair are wrought: 
The races rise and cluster, 
The evils fade and fall, 
Till chaos blooms to beauty, 
Thy purpose crowning all!’’2 


1David Starr Jordan. 
2 W. C. Gannett. 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 73 


Looking back over all this evolution of the 
human best in man, shallow thinking may 
say, Accident! Profounder thought says, 
There can have been no accident. All has 
been part of the Eternal Order. Evolution 
is God’s plan of things. All evolution on 
this earth, so far as we know, culminates in 
man. Man culminates in the moral and the 
spiritual. These must at last become dom- 
inant in his life, and love must crown all. 
Then, but not before, will he be a complete 
man, a man after “the measure of the stature 
of the fulness of Christ.” 

Nor can the evolution stop with the indi- 
vidual: it must extend itself throughout 
society. Social, industrial, and political ev- 
olution must continue until the moral is 
everywhere dominant in social relations, in 
business, and in the State. 


Says Herbert Spencer: 


“Human progress is not an accident, but a neces- 
sity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a 
part of nature; all of a piece with the development 
of the embryo, or the unfolding of a flower. The 
modifications mankind have undergone, and are 
still undergoing, result from a law underlying the 
whole organic creation; and provided the human 
race continues, and the constitution of things re- 
mains the same, these modifications must end in 
completeness. As surely as the tree becomes bulky 


74 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


when it stands alone, and slender if one of a group; 
as surely as the same creature assumes the different 
forms of cart-horse and race-horse, according as its 
habits demand strength or speed; as surely as a 
blacksmith’s arm grows large, and the skin of a 
laborer’s hand thick; as surely as the eye tends to 
become long-sighted in the sailor and short-sighted 
in the student; as surely as the blind attain a 
more delicate sense of touch; as surely as the clerk 
acquires rapidity in writing and calculation; as 
surely as the musician learns to detect an error of a 
semi-tone amidst what seems to others a very babel 
of sounds; as surely as a passion grows by indul- 
gence, and diminishes when restrained; as surely as 
a disregarded conscience becomes inert, and one 
obeyéd active; as surely as there is any efficacy in 
educational culture, or any meaning in such terms 
as habit, custom, practice; so surely must the 
human faculties be moulded into complete fitness 
for the social state; so surely must the things we 
call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must 
man become more and more perfect.” 


Such a perfecting of man and such dom- 
inance of the moral in society will mean 
nothing less than the establishment on the 
earth of what Jesus called “the kingdom of 
God.” 

Of course most of the moral and religious 
evolution which I have been endeavoring to 
sketch in this chapter took place before his- 
toric time. But the process has continued 


1 Social Statics, p. 78 f. 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 75 


right on since recorded history began, and is 
going on still. Nor is there reason to believe 
that it will cease in any discernible future. 

Perhaps the most remarkable record of re- 
ligious evolution on a large scale that we 
have is the Bible. This will be considered 
more fully in a subsequent chapter, but a 
word may be said concerning it here. The 
whole story of the Hebrew people in Palestine 
is the history of the evolution of a religion. 
The Bible is both the outcome and the record 
of that evolution for a thousand years. An 
important part of the Bible’s value lies in the 
fact that it 7s a record of religious evolution 
for so long a time, on so large a scale, and 
under so exceptionally favorable circum- 
stances. 

If the religious evolution of the Hebrew 
people attained at last a splendid height, we 
must not forget that it began very low. It 
began in polytheism. Jehovah was thought 
of as only one of many gods. Other lands 
and peoples had their gods; Jehovah was the 
God of the Hebrew people, whom they must 
worship because he was theirs. The struggle 
up out of polytheism and the worship of 
other gods besides Jehovah, to the worship 
of one God alone, was long and difficult. Even 
a king like Solomon built altars and shrines 


76 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


to other gods. Not until well-nigh five hun- 
dred years after Solomon’s time was the poly- 
theism entirely gone. 

Moreover, the character ascribed to Jeho- 
vah in the earliest times was low, cruel, 
vindictive, almost wanting in moral elements. 
We are told of his demanding not only blood- 
iest animal sacrifices, but human sacrifice. 
He commands the slaughter of men, women, 
and helpless, innocent children. The pictures 
given of him in the Book of Judges show 
how low and imperfect a conception of the 
divine character the Hebrew people had when 
their history, as recorded in the Bible began. 
But in every age there was advance. No 
age was without individual men who believed 
in truth and right and justice; men who had 
attained to higher ideas of God than their 
fellows; men who listened to the voice of 
God speaking in their souls, through reason 
and conscience. Because these seers, these 
prophet-souls saw with clearer light than 
their fellows, and had the courage of their 
convictions, they were able to lead the nation 
on and up to higher moral life and worthier 
views of God and religion, until at last the 
splendid moral and spiritual heights were 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 77 


attained which we see in the Psalms, in 
Isaiah, and in the New Testament.? 

But if the history of the religion of ancient 
Israel was an evolution, not less has the 
history of Christianity been also an evolution. 

Indeed no careful investigator can doubt 
that the law of religious evolution is operative 
in the world to-day on a far wider scale and 
with far more conspicuous results than ever 
before. I think I should not overstate if I 
said that the past century has witnessed 
more important religious advances in the 
world than any single century, if not than - 
any five centuries, of the past. And I be- 
lieve all the indications are that the next 
century will witness advances greater still. 

How are we to help on the evolution of reli- 
gion in the world? By helping on the prog- 
ress of all knowledge, all truth, all good. 
Religious evolution cannot go alone. It must 
go hand in hand with enlightenment. The 
moral is insecure without the intellectual. In 
a low civilization religion must be low and 
crude. As knowledge and thought advance, 
religion rises to greater purity. In an age 


1For a fuller treatment of the evolution of re- 
ligious ideas among the ancient Hebrew people, as 
shown in the Bible, see the author’s book, “The Origin 
me Character of the Bible,” The Beacon Press, Inc., 
oston. 


78 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


of ignorance, superstition, and credulity, re- 
ligion can hardly rise above the low plane of 
magic and priestcraft. In the middle ages 
the religion of Europe was dark, because the 
intellect of Europe was dark. The chief work 
accomplished by Luther was that of letting 
in light, and freeing the minds of men. When 
men began to think, the quality of their reli- 
gion began to improve. If to-day the religion 
of Protestant Christian lands is the best in 
the world, it is because the intelligence of 
these countries is the highest in the world. 

The practical lesson of all this for men who 
love religion is, Foster education; spread 
abroad useful knowledge; promote science; 
maintain schools and colleges; establish 
libraries; encourage free thought. Be not 
afraid that these will destroy or injure reli- 
gion; they will purify it, ennoble it, and save 
it. 

It is difficult to think of anything more un- 
reasonable than that intelligent men should 
fear the doctrine of Evolution. And yet 
many are afraid lest it injure religion. They 
could not be more shortsighted. Evolution 
would not be God’s plan of things if it were 
not wise and safe. It is God’s method by 
which in all the past he has been turning 
seeming evil into good, and good into better. 


THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 79 


Let us have faith; by the same divine method 
he will yet turn better into best. 

‘We are sometimes asked, will not man 
eventually outgrow religion? The best an- 
swer to this question is Evolution. What 
has been in man from the beginning will be 
in him to the end. Especially what is highest 
in him we may be sure will not be outgrown. 
He will get purer and better religion; he will 
not be content with less religion. As man 
rises in civilization he learns to prize the best 
things more, not less. He learns to give 
more attention to knowledge, to books, to 
nature, to art, to music, to everything that 
enlarges and enriches his life. Therefore we 
may be sure that he will not turn his back 
upon religion, the greatest enlarger, the great- 
est enricher, the greatest ennobler of life, 
that humanity has ever found in all its long 
history. No, the future of religion is secure. 
And the pledge of that security is God’s great 
divine law of Evolution. 


CHAPTER IV 


THE PROBLEM OFPAIN AND EVIL 
IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION 


THE problem of Pain and Evil is a very 
serious one. It meets everybody. He who 
has not been troubled by it, who has not at 
some time wrestled with it, and tried to find 
a solution for it, has never done much think- 
ing, and knows little about the earnest side of 
human life. 

The little child almost before he can walk 
or talk begins to meet the problem. Why 
does he fall and bump his head? Why does 
the fire burn him? Why does his toy horse 
break when he strikes it with a stick? Why 
does not his mother always let him have what 
he wants? These are the forms that the prob- 
lem of evil takes to the experience of the — 
child. 

As he gets older it takes other forms: Why 
must he go to school, or work, when he 
would rather play? Why is he sometimes 
sick? Why did his friend and companions 
move away to some distant place, or die? 
Why do accidents happen to people? Why do 


PAIN AND EVIL 81 


evil thoughts come into his mind—thoughts 
of anger and hatred and selfishness—when 
he tries to keep them out? 

And then, as he grows to manhood’s estate, 
the problem still confronts him in ever chang- 
ing forms: Why are there poverty and vice 
and crime in the world? Why tornadoes, and 
destructive floods and earthquakes and un- 
timely frosts, and blight and mildew of 
crops? Why railway and steamship dis- 
asters? Why wars and tyrannies? Why is 
the battle of life so severe? And why can no 
one escape it? Why do disappointments and 
wrecks of hopes come to men? Why do men 
grow old? Why does death come to old and 
young alike? What does death mean? Why 
are there such things as pain and suffering 
and death in the world at all? Why is not 
human life a long day of sunshine and happi- 
ness, and immunity from pain, and freedom 
from toil and care, and fruition of all one’s 
hopes? Could it not just as well have been 
so? If God were good would he not have 
made it so? Such thoughts as these come to 
all earnest minds. What shall we do with 
them? The only way we can find peace is 
by facing them, thinking them through, and 
getting for ourselves a philosophy of life large 
enough and complete enough to have within 


82 EVOLUTION AND KELIGION 


it a place for them all. When once we have 
attained a view of the universe, of God and 
of human life, sufficiently comprehensive to 
gather up into itself all these forms of seem- 
ing evil, and build them as stones into an 
edifice of universal good, then, but not before, 
will their power to hurt us be taken away. 

Can this be done? : 

Thinkers in all ages of the world have at- 
tempted the task. Some have reached one 
conclusion, some another. Some have offered 
systems of philosophy which they believed 
accomplished the end desired. Others have 
given up in despair, and declared that the 
presence of evil in the world means either 
that God is not almighty, or else that he is 
not good. Epicurus, the philosopher of 
Greece, put the matter in this way: ‘Either 
God is willing to remove evils and not able, or 
else able and not willing, or neither able nor 
willing; for if he be both able and willing, 
whence do they come?” 

John Stuart Mill has drawn a terrible 
picture of nature marching straight to her 
ends without regard to what or whom she 
may crush on the way. Says Mill: 


“Nature impales men, breaks them on the wheel, 
casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns 
them to death, crushes them with stones like the 


PAIN AND EVIL 83 


first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, 
freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or 
slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of 
other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingen- 
ious cruelty of a Nero or Domitian never surpassed.” 


This is a terrible arraignment of nature. 
Is it true? If it is, does it compel the conclu- 
sion that the God of nature is not good? The 
conclusion that Mill himself reaches is, that 
the limitation is on the side of God’s power. 
He thinks we are not necessarily driven to 
deny the goodness of the Creator; but we 
must conclude that he is not omnipotent. In 
creating and carrying on the physical uni- 
verse God is compelled to use matter and 
force. But these have a nature of their own 
and properties of their own, which limit the 
divine power. It is to this limitation of his 
power in respect to nature, therefore, Mr. 
Mill believes, that we are to attribute the 
cruelty which we see in nature, and not to any 
purpose or wish of cruelty, or any lack of 
goodness, on the part of the Creator him- 
self. Is this the true view? It is an intricate 
as well as a serious problem, but I do not 
by any means think it hopeless. 

First, the great thinkers of the past who 
have studied the problem of evil, though they 
may not have wholly solved it, have thrown 


84 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


great light upon it, and light which is of value 
to us. It will be of service if I can offer some 
of that light. Second, and still more import- 
ant, since most of these thinkers wrote, a 
great new thought has come to the world, 
which I believe is proving a key to this prob- 
lem to a greater extent than any previous 
thought has ever done. It is our modern con- 
ception of Evolution. 

I do not mean that all the darkness which 
has so long enveloped the questions of pain 
and sorrow and evil in the world has been driv- 
en away by the evolutionary philosophy. Much 
still remains, and probably always will re- 
main. Man is finite, while God is infinite. 
The plans and purposes of the Infinite, we, 
with our limited powers cannot hope to 
understand, more than in very small part. 
And yet if Milton might undertake to justify 
the ways of God to men, as regards the mat- 
ter of sin and evil in the world, before the 
light of Evolution shone, it surely is less 
presumptuous to attempt the same now, 
helped by the far-reaching illumination of 
this great conception. 

The solution of the problem of evil which 
has long been the generally accepted one 
in Christendom, is that which postulates the 
doctrine of a fallen and ruined race, based 


PAIN AND EVIL 85 


upon the Old Testament story of the tempta- 
tion and disobedience of Adam and Eve in 
Paradise. It is claimed that here we have a 
true account of the origin of sin and suffer- 
ing in the world. 

Let us examine this claim. Let us see 
whether the Paradise story really explains - 
anything. And let us compare the light 
which it has to throw upon the problem of 
evil and pain with that which comes from the 
doctrine of Evolution. To do this it will be 
necessary for us to pass over a very little 
ground traversed in a preceding chapter. 
But this need not trouble us, since we shall 
do it by a different path and with different 
ends in view. 

We read in the Book of Genesis that the 
earth and man were created good. The in- 
ference is that there was no pain, no suffer- 
ing, no death, among men or animals, until 
Adam and Eve, tempted by a talking serpent, 
which the Christian world has generally re- 
garded as an embodiment of Satan, ate the 
forbidden fruit. We are told that as a result 
of that disobedience God cursed the serpent, 
condemning it henceforth to go on its belly, 
and to eat dust. He cursed the ground, that 
it should bring forth thorns and thistles. He 
cursed woman, that she should be in subjec- 


86 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


tion to her husband, and bring forth children 
in labor and sorrow. He cursed the man, that 
he should eat his bread in the sweat of his 
face, and by and by die. Thus we have death 
introduced into the world, and every kind of 
evil. And, if we admit the conclusions drawn 
by the dominant theology of Christendom, 
thus we have the whole human race morally 
ruined, and a very large proportion of ‘it 
doomed to endless perdition. 

In the light of present-day knowledge, is 
this a satisfactory explanation of the origin 
of the evil and suffering that are in the 
world? 

In our preceding studies we have found 
that, as a fact, there can have been no literal 
Adam and Eve. Man came into existence 
tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years 
earlier than the Genesis account contem- 
plates. He came into existence, not by a 
sudden act of creation, but by an evolutionary 
process. The Genesis stories of the creation, 
the Paradise-garden, the temptation, and the 
fall, are legends, and not historic narratives. 
In the nature of the case, therefore, it is 
folly to seek in them the cause of evil and 
pain in the world. Indeed, with the disap- 
pearance of Adam and the fall from the world 
of reality, all theological doctrines based upon 


PAIN AND EVIL 87 


them crumble into ruins and become worth- 
less. 

But there are other difficulties with the 
story of the fall besides its unhistoric char- 
acter. It pictures to us a world such as does 
not exist, never has existed, and cannot exist 
in connection with a law-governed or a 
moral universe. The story represents every- 
thing as arbitrary. Nothing is under law; 
there is no attention paid to the nature of 
things; there is no relation of ‘cause and 
effect ; there is no moral! order and no justice. 
If the story had said that as the result of the 
eating of the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve 
had suffered bodily illness, or even if it had 
gone so far as to say that they died, and 
if the story had stopped with that, we could 
see some rationality in the assertion, some 
relation of effect to cause. But when we are 
told that the first pair were forbidden to eat 
a certain fruit, and then because they ate 
it they were driven from their home and 
were doomed to death; that all their innocent 
descendants were also doomed to death; and 
that the earth, which had done nothing 
wrong, was cursed, we cannot but feel that 
we are in a realm where the laws of cause 
and effect do not operate and where there is 
no moral order and no justice. 


88 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


What justice could there be in placing the 
first human pair in circumstances such that 
a single mistaken act would ruin their lives 
irretrievably, not to say ruin all their de- 
scendants? What were they—these two—but 
children? They had no experience. God had 
told them not to eat; if they did they would 
die. But they did not know what dying was. 
Another being, who seemed to them as 
friendly as God, and who for aught they knew 
might be as wise, came to them in the form 
of a serpent and told them to eat, saying that 
they would not die, but would grow wise and 
become as gods. How could they tell which 
was speaking the truth? Surely wisdom was 
desirable. The serpent therefore seemed to 
offer them the greater good. So they did as 
the serpent said, and ate. Was there any- 
thing strange in that? Could it have been an 
act of very deep guilt? Let two little children 
to-day under like circumstances commit an 
act of disobedience, and how heavy punish- 
ment would any intelligent and just parent 
inflict upon them? Then on what principle 
of justice or reason could God decree that, 
because of a single failure to obey on the part 
of two children of the early world, not only 
they but all mankind should fall (to quote 
the language of the Westminster Catechism) 


PAIN AND EVIL 89 


“under his wrath and curse,” and so be made 
“liable to all the miseries of this life, to death 
itself, and to the pains of hell forever?” 

Thus we see that nothing is really explained 
by the Genesis story. Rather is the confusion 
deepened. We are simply left with moral and 
physical evil in the world, with seemingly no 
good reason, and no purpose to be served by 
either, and no one really responsible but God. 
The attempt to shift the responsibility upon 
Adam breaks down utterly; for who made 
Adam? Who placed him, without any ex- 
perience or moral strength, in a situation 
where he would be subjected to a temptation 
greater than he could resist? The attempt to 
shift the responsibility upon the tempter 
breaks down as completely; for who made the 
tempter? and who permitted him to enter the 
garden, and to ply his arts upon his defence- 
less victims? And then, the enormity of hang- 
ing the fate of the world upon the issue 
of such a trial!—if they yielded—these 
inexperienced two—the result, a ruined 
race! and an endless hell for untold millions! 
Did the mind of man ever conceive anything 
more irrational or more shocking? 

So much for the Genesis story of the fall 
as a solution of the problem of evil. 

And now, let us turn from the old to the 


90 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


new; and from Paradise tragedy and the 
theologies founded thereupon, to the doctrine 
of Evolution. What light has Evolution to 
throw upon the problem of sin and evil and 
pain in the world? 

It is sometimes complained of Evolution 
that its conception of the origin of evil is not 
serious enough. In this respect some persons 
suppose it to contrast unfavorably with the 
old thought. 

I believe this is an error. What we have 
already seen, I think, should show us that it is 
an error. It is the Genesis story and its 
associated theology that make the origin of 
evil light and trivial. Think of trying to 
explain the sin and evil and pain and suffer- 
ing in the world during all the centuries past 
and to come, by the child-mistake of an Adam 
and Eve! As if so slight a matter as the 
eating of an apple in disobedience to a half- 
comprehended command could account for the 
origin of the cruelty, the hate, the revenge, 
the selfishness, the brutality, the slaveries, the 
wars, the crimes that have blackened and still 
blacken the earth! It does not even begin to 
account for them. We must go infinitely 
deeper down, and into a region of infinitely 
more solid realities, before we find an ex- 
planation that is sufficiently serious, or, as we 


PAIN AND EVIL 91 


have already seen, that really explains any- 
thing. In other words, we must go to Evo- 
lution. Ask of Evolution whence come the 
hatreds, the greeds, the revenges, the selfish- 
nesses, the brutalities, the wars of men, and 
the answer you get will not be, They are the 
result of a momentary act of inexperienced 
children in a Paradise garden; but, They 
come out of a thousand centuries of lower 
animal life: They are the traces of the beast 
surviving in man. They are the heritage of 
untold ages of selfishness and greed and blood 
and slaughter in that brute world from which 
man has sprung, and of hundreds of thousands 
of years of fierce semi-human life while he 
was climbing toward the full human; while 
yet the selfish struggle to preserve his own life 
was well-nigh all, and before the nobler 
struggle to preserve the life of others, and 
therefore the social and moral element in his 
own life had come in. 

Here you have an explanation both of the 
origin and the nature of evil that is sufficiently 
serious. Here you have an explanation that 
goes back and down to the roots of things, and 
that explains. No wonder the greed and self- 
ishness and cruelty and all the brute passions 
of man are such terrible realties, and fight 
such battles against the higher forces of his 


92 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


nature, and require so hard battling to over- 
come them, when they came into his life 
through so long an ancestry! 

What is evil? The reply of Evolution is, 
Evil is animalism. It is all that old brute 
world seeking to keep its ascendency, warring 
against the coming dominion of the soul. It is 
matter refusing to yield to spirit. It is the 
lower refusing to move up higher. . 

It is what St. Paul described with such 
power in Romans, seventh chapter, as the war 
which he feels going on in himself, between 
his lower and his higher natures, between the 
flesh and the spirit, between the animal na- 
ture, with its appetites and passions, and 
the spiritual man, with its aspirations and 
ideals: ‘‘I see a law in my members warring 
against the law of my mind, and bringing me 
into captivity to the law of sin which is in my 
members. . .  .Whoshall deliver me from 
the body of this death?” 

In the light of Evolution evil is relative, as 
good is. Evil is incompleteness. Evil is an 
incident, not a finality. If we can understand 
the expression in a large enough way, evil is 
good in the making; it is the green apple; it is 
the partly painted picture; it is the building 
in process of erection. Evolution says, The 
world was not created perfect and complete. 


PAIN AND EVIL 93 


It began its career away back in time farther 
than the mind can think. The creative process 
has been going on ever since, and is going on 
still. Thus the world rises in complexity of 
conditions, and in quality of life. There are, 
incident to its changes and its progress, a 
thousand things which, looked at in some 
aspects, are evils, but yet which have a part 
in helping on the advance, and hence in 
achieving the larger results of good. 

Of man Evolution says, He was not created 
at first in a state of physical, mental, and 
moral completeness, from which he fell into 
a condition of ruin. Instead, he began his 
career far down. From his first low condition 
he has, somewhat haltingly and irregularly, 
but on the whole persistently, advanced until 
he has become what we now see. Evil mani- 
fests itself in the mistakes which he makes as 
he gropes his way onward and upward. 
Especially is evil the tendency in him to choose 
the lower instead of the higher, to cling to the 
old heritage which comes to him from the 
brute, instead of relinquishing that to lay hold 
of the better things which make for man- 
hood. 

Thus in Evolution we begin to find a basis 
for a faith in God that is not shaken by the 
existence of evil in the world, because it has a 


94. EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


philosophy which sees that even evil — tem- 
porary evil — may serve ends of good beyond 
itself, and help build a larger structure which 
is not evil but good. | 

In the light of Evolution no evil, however 
severe or terrible, necessarily means a God 
who does not care for men. Even earth- 
quakes, cyclones, floods, and conflagrations do 
not necessarily mean either want of goodness 
or want of power on God’s part. They simply 
mean that the world is under law. And if law 
is good, then the fact that the universe is un- 
der law is a proof that God is good. 

Is law good? Let us suppose a universe 
under law and another not under law; which 
would be the better, and the better for man? 
To ask the question is to answer it. Man 
simply could not exist in a universe without 
law; nay, the universe itself could not exist, 
as a universe; it would instantly become a 
chaos. Thus if it was kind for God to create | 
‘man at all, it was kind to put him under law. 

What is an earthquake? It is simply a 
world going through its evolutionary process 
of cooling and contracting under law. What 
is a tornado or a cyclone? It is simply the 
wind moving under law amid such conditions 
as sometimes arise on a planet like ours. 
What is a conflagration? It is simply fire 


PAIN AND EVIL 95 


obeying the laws of its own nature under 
certain conditions. These calamities may 
destroy property, or even life, but that does 
not mean that God is cruel, unless putting the 
world under law—that is, creating it at 
all—was cruel. 

Men talk very strangely about God, as if he 
could both do and not do at the same time. 
They want him to create fire under law, and 
yet not let it burn their goods or their houses, 
when it comes in contact with them. They 
want water to remain water, and yet not 
drown them when they fall into it. They are 
simply asking for contradictions —for what 
is impossible in the nature of the case. They 
are asking something as insane as that two 
and two should be five; or that a part should 
be greater than the whole; or that a straight 
line should not be the shortest distance be- 
tween two points. They are asking that the 
universe shall not be rational, which is only 
another way of asking that it shall not exist. 

Of course we may suppose that God could 
save persons from all accidents and calamities 
by working special miracles in their behalf. 
But what kind of a world would we have if a 
miracle were wrought to save everybody from 
every kind of danger, calamity, and harm? 
What would become of our law-governed 


96 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


world? And would it be so good for man? 
If we knew that some guardian power were 
watching over us, to protect us from every 
possibility of danger or harm, would it not 
destroy our foresight, our alertness, our power 
to care for ourselves, and thus prove a far 
greater harm than good? What has made us 
men, but thought, care, foresight, guarding 
against the breaking of law, planning for our- 
selves, standing on our own feet? | 

Sicknesses, and especially epidemics, are 
often pointed to as evidences that God is heart- 
less; if he is good why does he send these evils 
upon men? The answer is, Many illnesses 
are the result of man’s ignorance or care- 
lessness. Nearly all epidemics are. We 
should blame men, therefore, and not God. 
Even where we cannot discover the cause of 
illness, there probably is a cause somewhere in 
some violation of a law of health by the suf- 
ferer or his ancestors. The law is God’s; the 
violation is man’s. So, then, it is still our duty 
to blame man rather than God. 

We are apt to complain of pain as if it were 
an evil. Really it is a good. It is nature’s 
signal of danger. It puts us on our guard. It 
tells us that the part where the pain is needs 
rest or help. And so through the kindly moni- 
tion of pain our lives are often saved. 


PAIN AND EVIL 97 


Men complain of poverty, and hardship, and 
struggle, and often say in bitterness, Why 
does God send them upon us? The truth is, 
men often bring these on themselves. But 
even when they do not, why should they see 
in these things a sign of God’s want of love or 
care? It is poverty, hardship, and struggle 
that have built up a large part of the strong- 
est life and noblest character of the world. 
Men who never have to struggle grow inactive, 
ease-loving, weak, and find themselves far out- 
stripped in achievement and in the race of life 
by those who are spurred to energy by hard- 
ship. 

Cold and suffering are spoken of as evils. 
But cold and suffering have created the home: 
cold, by driving families in-doors, and around 
a common hearth; and suffering, by calling 
forth the tenderness, sympathy, and love 
which give to home its sacred character. 

The long, helpless childhood of the human 
infant —so much longer and more helpless 
than that of almost any other creature — 
seems when looked at superficially to be a 
great misfortune, and an indication that the 
Creator’s plan of things is bad. But really 
the prolongation of infancy is what has made 
humanity. The utterly dependent condition 
of her babe for so long a period has awakened 


98 _ EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


the maternal instinct and created that finest, 
highest product of the race, the human mother. 
The dependence of his children, too, has de- 
veloped the man into the father; while the 
extended period of growth of the children, and 
their long continuance in the home before go- 
ing out to make a living for themselves, have 
given them such training, and enabled them 
to acquire so large a part of the knowledge and 
experience of their parents, as have given 
them a tremendous advantage over every other 
form of animal life, and carried mankind for- 
ward and upward to an amazing degree. It is 
hardly possible to estimate the value to the 
race of this seeming evil—the helplessness, 
the slow development, and the long need for 
care and protection, on the part of the human 
child. } 

Thus we see how many things there are 
which, looked at superficially, seem evils, but 
which, examined more carefully, turn out to 
be priceless blessings. 

Perhaps the severest indictment against na- 
ture that can be made at all is that which we 
are prompted to make on account of that re- 
lentless struggle for existence which has been 
going on during all the history of life on the 
planet. Truly nature has been “red in tooth 
and claw.” | 


PAIN AND EVIL 99 


“Then marked he how the lizard fed on ant, and snake 
on him, 
And kite on both; and how the fish hawk 
Robbed the fish tiger of that which he had seized,— 
The shrike chasing the bulbul, which did chase 
The jewelled butterfiies, till everywhere 
Each slew a slayer, and itself was slain.” 


Such a state of things has led many to ask if 
there can be a God of goodness in the uni- 
verse. But even here we are not left without 
some light, if we will look for it. There can be 
no question that out of this very struggle there 
has come a vast advance in the world, and 
therefore a vast good to the world as a whole. 
It is through this struggle that the fittest have 
been selected to survive, and thus progress on 
a world-scale has been secured. Man’s exist- 
ence is due to this struggle. The only ques- 
tion is regarding those innumerable lives that 
have been sacrificed in the struggle, to make 
the advance possible, and prepare the way for 
man. Has the price that has had to be paid 
for the advance, and for man, been justifi- 
able? The reply is, When we consider what 
mind and soul mean, it seems hard to think of 
a price too great to pay for them. 

As to the cruelty of all this sacrifice of life, 
this is to be said: All these innumerable 
creatures had life given them and enjoyed it 
for a season. Was it not better, kinder to 


100 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


them, to let them live and die than not to live 
at all? And die they must have done anyway, 
even if there had been no struggle for life and 
no foe. Would death by old age and decay 
have been kinder than by devouring fellow- 
creature? It is doubtful. Sudden death is 
probably the most desirable of all deaths. 
Persons who have been nearly killed by lions 
and tigers tell us that the process was almost 
wholly painless. Thus it is probable that the 
very process of animal feeding on animal, 
whereby the weakest have been eliminated and 
the fittest have been made to survive, has 
resulted in less suffering than would have 
taken place if there had been no carnivora in 
the world. 

This fierce struggle for life went on until 
man came on the scene. It built his body; but 
it could not build his soul. For that there 
must be wholly new agencies, and new agen- 
cies came. That beautiful struggle for the 
life of others began, which has endowed the ~ 
human race with sympathy, care, unselfish- 
ness, and love, and which will not cease till all 
the sorrows and pain that afflict humanity are 
cured. 

Of course it is very easy for men to find 
fault with the plan of things, if they are 
shallow men, or, if they are very shallow, it is 


PAIN AND EVIL 101 


easy for them to declare that they could de- 
vise a better. But thoughtful and profound 
minds stand in wonder and awe at the world 
as it is—especially as it is revealed in the 
light of the marvellous evolution through 
which it has come, and which is still bearing it 
on to greater things. 

Certain it is that the thought of the devel- 
opment of the world under law has been the 
one illuminating conception of our century, 
shedding light everywhere. Not least illumi- 
nating has been its light upon the problem 
of evil. By showing us that the world is not 
made, but making, and that even man is far 
from finished, the thought of Evolution lets 
us see that much which we have called evil is 
not evil. It is only incompleteness. It is a 
building in process of erection. It is an en- 
gine with one part making here, another 
there, another yonder. By and by the parts 
will be gathered together into a whole; then 
we shall see their meaning. Evolution says, 
Wait; have faith; God has plenty of time; 
the consummation will appear, largely in this 
world, fully in another. 

The kind of evil that now most hurts this 
world is moral evil. What is moral evil? The 
root of it is selfishness. Once selfishness was 
not an evil. In the brute fighting his physical 


102 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


battle, it was a good. But man has risen to 
something higher. He must live for wife, 
child, friend, neighbor, country, the world. 
That is the very condition of his manhood. To 
live for self alone is to gravitate back to the 
old brute condition. 

For man’s moral evolution to get a start 
was a process inconceivably slow. But every 
step of its advance made the next step easier. 
How long it took nature to create a mother! 
How long a father! How long a friend! 
How long a lover of humanity! Now we have 
millions of mothers, of fathers, of friends, of 
lovers of their fellow-men, to help forward the 
higher life of mankind. Thus the world moves 
on with accelerated and fast accelerating 
speed. This means greater things for the 
future than we understand. 

Looking around and seeing the many evils 
in society, we sometimes shudder and are 
tempted to discouragement. We ought rather 
to be encouraged because we see the evils. 
They have always existed in society. At last 
we are getting our eyes open so that we can 
recognize them as evils. Many evils have al- 
ready been destroyed, more must be, will be. 
The great movement of the world’s evolution 
on the social and ethical plane will not go 
backward. No wrong, however hoary, has 


PAIN AND EVIL * 103 


any sure lease of life. Only the right and the 
good can permanently endure. 

No, it is not a fallen world that we are in, 
but arising one. Eden is not behind, but be- 
fore. Man’s great day is coming, not past. 
There has been no wreck of God’s great plan 
of things, but a steady carrying forward of all 
the acts of the sublime drama from the begin- 
ning until now. And what has been is a pledge 
of what will be. 

Doubtless the philosophy of Evolution 
needs, to complete it, the thought of Immor- 
tality, to carry the process begun here in the 
individual on and up to its full consummation 
in another life, and also to make good any 
seeming injustices that may not have been set 
right in this world—a thought to which 
Tennyson gives powerful expression in his 
little poem ‘‘The Play” :— 


“Act First, this Earth, a stage so gloomed with woe 
You all but sicken at the shifting scenes. 
And yet, be patient! Our Playwright may show 
In some Fifth Act what this wild Drama means!” 
I believe that immortality is the legitimate 
and necessary goal and crown of Evolution. 
But this will be the subject of my next chapter, 
and hence requires only mention here. 
In conclusion let me say: Standing with 
eyes open to see every dark and cruel thing 


104 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


that is or ever has been in the world; facing 
all evil, all wrong, all pain, all suffering; lis- 
tening fully to every complaint and every in- 
dictment that can be made against nature and 
her cruelty, and against man and his injustice 
to his brother — I still believe that we have a 
right to sing with Browning: 

“This world’s no blot for us, 

No blank; it means intensely, and it means good.” 


“God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that. 
So doth thy right hand guide us through the world.” 
I believe that Lowell saw deep below the 
surface of things, deep into the heart of 
reality, when he wrote: 
“All of God’s angels come to us disguised. 
Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, 
One after another lift their frowning mask; 
And we behold the seraph’s face beneath, 
All radiant with the glory and the calm 
Of having looked upon the front of God.” 
Deeply understood, I believe there is noth- 
ing really to disturb, but everything to sup- 
port, the faith—the most uplifting ever 
cherished by man—that we all, and all the 
world are in the hands of One who has the 
wisdom and the goodness to plan the best 
things, and the power to carry them out. 
We need not be discouraged by any evils 
that still remain in the world. Rather should 


PAIN AND EVIL 105 


we be mightily encouraged by the unmistak- 
able signs that evils are lessening. All we 
need be troubled about is lest we fail to ally 
ourselves with the forces of light that are 
making the evils fewer. 

Our business in life is to be workers with 
God. If there is evil, it will some day be 
driven out. God’s great evolutionary plan of 
things makes sure of that. But the time when 
depends upon you and me. Evil is conquered 
only by good, good wrought out by the hearts 
and brains and hands of living men and wom- 
en. If we fail, the consummation waits. 

Every year it becomes a greater shame 
for any human being to have deaf ears to 
humanity’s cry for help. Evolution’s ever 
clearer and clearer sounding message to all 
good men and women is, Join hands with God, 
to help him lift his world a little nearer 


_ heaven. 


CHAPTER V 


IMMORTALITY IN THE LIGHT OF 
EVOLUTION 


Most of us are familiar with that fine passage 
in Shakespeare’s Tempest: 

“The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 

The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | 

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 

As dreams are made on; and our little life 

Is rounded with a sleep.” 

This is one view of the world, and of human 
life. 

Place beside it another. It shall be from 
Paul’s second Epistle to the Corinthians: 
“We look not at the things which are seen, 
but at the things which are not seen; for the 
things which are seen are temporal, but the 
things which are not seen are eternal. For 
we know that if our earthly house of this 
tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building 
of God, a house not made with hands, eternal 
in the heavens.” 

Which of these two views of the world 
and of life is the true one? What are these 


IMMORTALITY 107 


human lives of ours? Are they things of 
a day only? Or do they take hold on eter- 
nity? When the funeral bell tolls for our 
friends (as it will soon toll for us), and 
we gather around their motionless forms to 
bid them farewell, will it be forever? Or 
will there be a glad meeting awaiting us on 
some fairer shore? 

These are questions that none of us can 
avoid asking. We should be less than human 
if we did not ask them. One difference be- 
tween us and the brute animals below us is 
that we can ask them, and search for an 
answer. 

Can Evolution give an answer? Can it 
help us in the direction of an answer? 

Before making an inquiry concerning the 
evidences of immortality, it will be of service 
to do a little preliminary thinking on the gen- 
eral subject of evidence. There is confusion 
in many minds as to this whole matter of 
proof bearing on such subjects as that of life 
beyond this world. Many men say thought- 
lessly, “Give us demonstration; give us 
demonstration; then we will believe; not 
otherwise.” Do they know what they are 
saying? What do they mean by demonstra- 
tion? Mathematical demonstration? Is this 
subject of a future life one of mathematics? 


108 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


Then how are you going to apply mathematical 
demonstration to it, one way or the other — 
to prove or to disprove? Is it a subject of 
logic? Then how are you going to. apply 
logical demonstration to it, one way or the 
other ? 

The truth is, very few things in this world 
can we demonstrate, even of those that we | 
most firmly believe, and concerning which we ¥ 
have the best grounds for confidence. We SA! 4°92” 
cannot demonstrate that the sun will rise to- hw a 
morrow. We can establish a very strong | 
probability that it will, but that is all. Yet | 
that is enough. No reasonable man asks for 4 

| 





more. On the strength of that probability e | 
we make all our plans for to-morrow, and go By 
forward to meet the day with perfect con- A 
fidence. i 

So with regard to nearly everything in life, 
our ground for belief is reasonable probability. 
All business is conducted on grounds of simply 
reasonable probability. No railroad company ) 
knows at the beginning of any day that it will - 
have a single passenger that day. It makes all } | 
its preparations for the day’s traffic on the > | 
grounds of probability. No merchant when he : 
opens his store in the morning knows that he 
will have a customer. Nobody knows that ie 
there will be a student in any school of this | 





IMMORTALITY 109 


city next year or to-morrow. And yet reason- 
able probability is so safe a ground for trust 
and belief in all these matters that nobody 
thinks of asking for any other. 

Here is a lesson for us in regard to grounds 
of belief in immortality. Why are we not 
content with the same kind of evidence here 
that we have in other things? We call a man 
a fool if he will not trust reasonable proba- 
bility, and trust it with perfect confidence, in 
business, and in nearly everything pertaining 
to life. We call him a fool if he insists on 
demonstration. Then why should we insist 
on demonstration as soon as we begin to talk 
about things of another life? Why are we 
not satisfied there also with reasonable proba- 
bility? And on the basis of such reasonable 
probability, if indeed we are able to find it, 
why do we not rest with assurance and peace? 
I bring up this point at the beginning, so that 
none of us may misunderstand regarding the 
evidence required to give us ground for be- 
lief in immortality; and so that all may avoid 
the folly of demanding demonstration in a 
realm where demonstration is neither pos- 
sible nor needed. 

Very well, then, in the light of Evolution do 
there seem to be valid reasons for believing in 
a future life? And, if so, what are they? 


110 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


These questions can be best answered by 
considering, first, some objections. 

1. Perhaps the objection that is oftenest 
made to the doctrine of immortality is that of 
its impossibility, on the ground that mind 
cannot exist without organism. In this world 
man lives and thinks; but it is because he has 
a brain. The brain is the organ of thought. 
There can be no thought without brain. When 
a man dies and his brain perishes, there is an 
end to the man; therefore, immortality is 
simply impossible. | 

What are we to say to this? It requires 
only a little reflection to discover an answer. 

In the first place, it seems to be a pure as- 
sumption that mind can exist only in connec- 
tion with an organism. That the human mind 
is associated with a physical organism in the 
present life does not prove that no other plan 
of things is possible. For aught we know 
there may be such a thing as free spirit — 
spirit existing untrammelled by any organism — 
of a physical kind—spirit as free as our 
thoughts are, and as superior to all brain limi- 
tations, matter limitations, space limitations 
—like our thoughts now here, now at the 
other side of the earth, now in the distant 
stars. Why may not spirit exist as free as 
that? We certainly see evidences of mind in 


IMMORTALITY 1 


nature everywhere, in the rose, in the gal- 
axies, in the sweep of law, in all the order of 
the universe. Has this mind a brain? Is it 
associated with organisms, or dependent on 
organism? Who dare say that? Then we 
had better be careful how we assert that there 
can be no mind without organism; and cer- 
tainly we had better consider before we de- 
clare that there can be no mind without brain. 

Even if we grant that mind does require an 
organism, what kind? Is no kind possible for 
something so fine as spirit, except such coarse 
brains as ours? Grant that in such a physical 
world as this—a world of earth, and rock, 
and air, and water, a world seen by the eye, 
and heard by the ear, and come into contact 
with by physical touch — such brains as ours 
may be necessary; but how about those finer, 
those subtler, those more wonderful worlds 
which science is revealing to us in so many 
ways ?—worlds which are all about us, which 
transcend and penetrate this gross world of 
sense — worlds which stretch away into in- 
finity, an “‘ Unseen Universe, ” and yet, though 
unseen, if possible more real, and infinitely 
more resourceful and more marvellous than 
the universe which our eyes behold! Into such 
a universe, limitless in possibilities, whether 
considered extensively or intensively, the spec- 


112 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


troscope and our theories of light-waves and 
of a universal ether give us a glimpse; into 
it electricity sets a door ajar; into it the 
Roentgen rays open a little window; into it 
the microscope with its marvels carries us a 
little way—an inch or two; of its wonders 
Professor Crooke’s “‘radiant energy” gives a 
hint. Are we to suppose that in such a uni- 
verse of infinite subtlety, and yet of solidest 
reality and inconceivable potentialities, mind 
must require an organism of the coarse kind 
which we see in our present brains and nerv- 
ous systems? 

Even if minds — at least finite minds like 
ours — do require an organism, is it not easy 
to conceive of an organism framed of the 
subtler material of the Unseen Universe — 
such material as radiant energy and the uni- 
versal ether and electricity and the X-rays 
give us intimation of? Some of our greatest — 


physicists are telling us that there is “no fact 


in physics, chemistry, or mechanics that con- 
travenes the theory of an electro-luminous 
organism for man,” such as may exist already 
unseen and unrecognized within his physical 
body, and wholly incapable of being affected 
by any such change as that of the dissolution 
of his body. 

Something like this seems to have been Saint 


IMMORTALITY 113 


Paul’s thought, nineteen hundred years ago, 
when he said “there is a natural body and a 
spiritual body’”—a body of flesh and blood, 
which is corruptible and perishes at death, 
and another of a nature finer and higher, 
which is incorruptible, and cannot be affected 
by death. The widely accepted, and I believe 
the fast-growing belief to-day among thought- 
ful men is virtually this. Toward essentially 
such a view I believe all our best science is 
tending. 

2. One profoundly significant fact we are 
very likely to overlook in all our discussions of 
the possibility of man’s living again after 
death; it is the fact that every man who is 
living at all is already living after death — 
and not only after one death, but after sev- 
eral. 

What do I mean? I mean that life and 
death are both at work all the while in our 
bodies. Without death there is no life. By 
the process which is known in physiological 
science as anabolism and katabolism our 
bodies are all the while dying and being built 
up again with new tissue. In some of the 
organs of the body the breaking down of the 
old tissue and the replacing of that which has 
done its work with new is rapid; in other or- 
gans it is comparatively slow. There seems to 


114 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


be no general consensus of opinion among 
scientists as to just how long a time it takes 
for the dying process to involve all the or- 
ganic matter of the body. It has sometimes 
been said that we get a wholly new physical 
organism once in seven years. This is a dog- 
matic statement which probably science does 
not justify. The time may be too short or it 
may be too long. But nothing is more certain 
than that the process of destruction and re- 
building is constantly going on, more or less 
rapidly, in every part of the body; and hence 
that, within a period longer or shorter, every 
particle of living matter in any given human 
organism at any particular time will have 
died, and most of it will have passed away 
from the organism, and its place will have 
been taken by other matter. This is only 
another way of saying that we are all con- 
stantly losing our bodies by death and getting 
new ones. In a few years — possibly three or 
four, possibly seven, possibly ten —all the 
living material in the bodies which we now 
have will be dead, and we, if we remain in the 
flesh at all, will be “‘ clothed upon ” with what 
in strictest scientific truth may be called new 
bodies. Thus I trust my meaning is clear 
when I say that we are all living after death, 
and most of us after many deaths. Our bodies 


IMMORTALITY 115 


died, we did not. Right through all these 
deaths each one of us (his soul, his conscious- 
ness, his ego, his real self, that thinks and 
wills and loves) has persisted, has lived right 
on. 

Does all this have no significance as bear- 
ing upon the subject of immortality? Men 
say, our souls cannot survive the death of 
our bodies. I reply: How do you know? 
What ground have you for such an inference? 
If we have already survived the death of our 
bodies many times, or even once, how dares 
any one deny that we may be able to do it 
again? Even if the next death comes in a 
somewhat different way from those of the 
past, it will be no more certainly death. 

8. Another objection to the doctrine of im- 
mortality, which is often made, is the claim 
that no line can be drawn between man and 
the animals below him, so that if man is im- 
mortal they also must be. They and he came 
into being by the same path of Evolution — 
many of them have bodies close akin to his; 
many give evidence of intelligence, reason, and 
other mental attributes similar to his; some 
even show moral qualities, as fidelity, a sense 
of duty, an ability to distinguish between right 
and wrong. Must we not believe, therefore, 
that they and he will have the same fate? If 


116 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


he lives again, will not they? If they perish, 
must not he? 

In reply, the first thought that suggests it- 
self is the inquiry: Why may it not be possible 
that at least all the nobler and more intelligent 
of the lower animals may live again? Some, 
by reason of their better qualities and their 
higher intelligence, would seem to be fitter to 
survive than others. Perhaps that is the ul- 
timate outcome of the great law of the sur- 
vival of the fittest, that some of the animals 
below man may be permitted to cross into an- 
other world and be man’s companions there as 
they have been here. It would seem easier to 
believe this than to believe that man is to 
perish. | 

However, I cannot think the claim is sound 
that man and the brute animals are to be 
classed together. We do not class them to- 
gether in other respects; why should we in 
this? There seem to be certain very radical 
distinctions between them. What are they? 
As pointed out in a previous chapter, the most 
important appears to be self-consciousness. 
When in the upward progress of animal life 
in this world a being arrived who was not only 
conscious, but was conscious that he was con- 
scious; who not only knew, but knew that he 
knew; who was a self-centred ego, able to 


IMMORTALITY 117 


think before and after, and to relate himself 
not only to his physical environment, but to 
truth and right and duty and the powers that 
placed him here, and to reach up after ideals 
of life higher than he had yet attained, then 
man was born. Then acreature had made his 
appearance on the earth not simply superior 
in degree to the horse and the dog and the ape, 
but different in kind. At last the century 
plant of the world’s life had blossomed, and 
the blossom was something more beautiful and 
precious than had ever before been seen be- 
neath earthly skies. 

Suppose we grant that the dog has some- 
thing which we may call a sort of rudimen- 
tary, partially formed mind; is there anything 
strange if nature permits a thing so imper- 
fect to pass out of existence at the death of 
the body which it has served? It is every- 
where nature’s plan, to let the imperfect, the 
only partially formed, drop out, and preserve 
permanently only the best, the most perfect. 

This also is man’s plan. Go with me into a 
great foundry where castings are being made. 
I see a hundred moulds filled with the shining 
metal. Wait until the moulds are opened. 
Ninety of the castings are perfect, ten are 
imperfect. What is done with the imperfect? 
They are broken, and melted over again. Is 


118 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


there anything unreasonable in that? Dogs, 
horses, apes, the animals below man, are the 
imperfect castings of the world of mind. Why 
should they be permanently kept? Man is the 
most perfect mind-product of the world. Is 
that not reason why he may be preserved, 
even when they are suffered to perish? | 

Nature is full of illustrations of that which, 
falling below a certain mark, fails, while that 
which rises above persists. Thus a seed, if it 
has within it a certain amount of vitality, 
lives, germinates, and produces after its kind, 
while if it lacks, no matter how little, of the 
requisite amount, it dies. 


Says John Fiske: 


“IT can see no insuperable difficulty in the notion 
that, at some period of the evolution of humanity, 
this the divine spark may have acquired sufficient 
concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of 
material forms and endure forever.” 


For one I cannot see why this view is not in 
the highest degree reasonable. 

4. One other objection to the doctrine of 
immortality I must mention in a word. It is 
the claim that in Evolution it is the race that 
is cared for, not the individual; so that if im- 
mortality of any kind awaits man we must be- 
lieve it is immortality of the race in this world, 


IMMORTALITY 119 


and not immortality of individual persons 
beyond this world. 

But how can nature care for the race with- 
out caring for individuals? Can the race be 
separated from the individuals who compose 
it? As for immortality of the race in this 
world, we know that cannot be; for it is only 
a question of time when the earth itself shall 
reach the end of its career, and when its shal- 
lowing seas, its frozen continents, and thin air 
will no longer sustain the life of man. 

But it is not true that nature does not care 
for individuals. Individuals are exactly what 
she does care for. Her whole effort is to pro- 
duce individuals that shall be finer and finer, 
more and more perfect. It is by improving 
her individuals that she makes all her ad- 
vances in species, genera, families, races. 
With such jealous and unfailing care for in- 
dividuals, and such constant effort to produce 
the best, is it any wonder if the individuals of 
that part of creation which represent her best 
should be perpetuated, and not allowed to 
perish? Shall nature not care enough for her 
chef-d’ oeuvre to save it from ruin? If there 
is to be any immortality at all, it must be of 
the individual, and in a sphere beyond the 
transitoriness of earthly conditions; it cannot 
be of the race here. Either there is immor- 


120 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


tality for individual man, or else there is utter 
and irremediable destruction for man, race, 
everything that this world has achieved or 
meant. 

Such, then, are the most serious objections, 
so far as I know, to the doctrine of man’s im- 
mortality considered in the light of Evolution. 
Looked at fairly do they not fade away? I 
believe the considerations presented show that 
they do, and that immortality, instead of be- 
ing impossible, is possible, and has much 
probability in its favor. 

But we are not yet through. Other adie even 
stronger arguments for immortality still re- 
main. 

1. First of all, it seems to be a well-nigh 
universal belief of men—a belief so deep as to 
be a very part of their nature —that death 
does not end all, but that there is another 
existence beyond the present scene. It is 
doubtful if a single people in the world can 
be pointed to, savage or civilized, that does 
not cherish this belief in some form. Even 
the Buddhists are no exception, as might easily 
be shown. 

Now what does this mean? This belief has 
not been wrought into the nations and races of 
mankind by chance. The universe has planted 
this faith in man’s soul. May we, then, believe 


IMMORTALITY 121 


it a lie? Is there no reality corresponding to 
it? 

Why has the universe wrought for man 
eyes? Because there was something to see. 
Why ears? Because there was something to 
hear. Why reason? Because he was in a 
universe that was rational. Why a sense of 
beauty? Because there was beauty all around 
him waiting to be recognized. Why love? Be- 
cause there were beings to be loved, and to 
love him in return. Why his belief in right 
and justice? Because there are right and jus- 
tice in the world. Is man’s belief in immor- 
tality an exception? While all else in his be- 
ing is grounded in reality, is this ineradicable 
faith of his, that he was not born to die, only a 
delusion? 

Do you say it is simply a superstition, like 
witchcraft, or faith in signs? Then why does 
it not show some marks of superstition? Why 
is it not confined to dark ages and uncivilized 
peoples? Why does it not tend to pass away 
with enlightenment? Instead of that, it is 
found nowhere in such strength as in enlight- 
ened ages, and among enlightened peoples. 
Nor is it the worst, but the best persons, that 
hold it most firmly. The greatest believers in 
immortality, as a rule, are the greatest and 
noblest souls of every age. 


122 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


I think all this means that the belief is ra- 
tional, and rooted in great realities which men 
may trust. I think man’s instinct that he is 
greater than the brute beasts, greater than a 
clod, greater than death, is a voice of the uni- 
verse—and this means a voice of God—speak- 
ing in his soul. 

2. Somewhat similar to this, yet different, 
is another argument, which I think ought to 
be regarded as having weight. It is the argu- 
ment of justice, based on the fact that man 
everywhere wants immortality, longs for it as 
for nothing else. There are here and there 
exceptions—men who say one life is enough. 
But they are so rare as to be scarcely visible 
amid the multitudes of those who long and 
pray for a life that has no death. Now what 
has put this desire into men’s hearts? Did 
they create it for themselves? It came to 
them from the Creator of their being. Did 
he give it to them in mockery? Can he of 
right withhold immortality from men into 
whose hearts he has himself put such desire 
for it? 

3. Have we not a right to base a faith in 
immortality on the greatness of man’s nature? 
Think of minds that can work out the intrica- 
cies of mathematics in all its endless forms; 
that can create sciences; that can write lit- 


IMMORTALITY 123 


eratures; that can bridge the ocean with swift 
steamships, and speak from shore to shore 
beneath its waters; and harness the lightnings, 
and measure and weigh the worlds of space; 
and rob surgery of pain, and say to pestilence, 
Stay thy hand of death; and transform deserts 
into paradises, and build great cities, and rule 
vast empires, and connect all sections together 
by trade, and link every city and town of 
every civilized land with every other by mail 
routes; and lift the world up century by cen- 
tury to higher and higher civilization! Can 
minds that accomplish all this be snuffed out 
as a candle at the end of a brief threescore 
years and ten? 

Is man built on a pattern suited only for 
a day? Look at these powers of his that are 
unearthing, restoring, reconstructing the past 
—actually creating the world’s past over 
again! We are digging up Rome, and open- 
ing its buried centuries and its forgotten his- 
tories to the light of day. We are excavating 
at many places in Greece and Crete and Asia 
Minor, and finding cities hidden beneath cities, 
and learning more about their history, their 
art, their civilization, and their life, than even 
Plato or Aristotle knew. The same with 
Egypt! A little while ago the great Egypt of 
the past was lost to the world. Men looked 


124 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


on her wonderful monuments with blind eyes 
that could not see. Not a word of the inscrip- 
tions that covered her temples and tombs could 
they read. The history and civilization of 
her almost numberless centuries were as if | 
they had not been. The same was true of 
Babylonia and Assyria. But within our cen- 
tury man has unlocked the mysteries of these 
lands and is bringing them all to light. So too 
he is creating anew the mound-builders and 
their lives, and the cave-dwellers and theirs, 
and is finding out the secrets of the ages be- 
fore man existed, when only brute beasts 
inhabited the earth, and of ages yet more re- 
mote when there was no life of any kind. In- 
deed it seems as if there is no secret of the 
past that he will not discover. Is such a being 
only a creature of a day? 

4. Are there not prophecies wrapped up in 
in man which declare that he was not born to 
die? 

Man’s nature seems to be full of prophecies 
of something greater than he has yet attained, 
or can attain in this world. Such a prophecy 
is seen in his capacity of growth and progress. 
The brute animals may advance a little way. 
Then the end of their tether is reached, they 
can go no farther. 

But man’s capacities for development are 


IMMORTALITY 125 


practically infinite. None may lay down a line 
beyond which he may not go. None can draw 
a circle bounding his knowledge or his 
thought. Only the universe is large enough 
for his home; only eternity long enough for 
the realization of the possibilities that sleep 
in his great nature. 

I know not how anything can be more clear 
than that human life as we see it in this world 
is a thing unfinished, incomplete. Does this 
incompleteness mean nothing? Everywhere 
we see “great powers and small performances; 
vast schemes and petty results, ‘thoughts that 
wander through eternity,’ and a life that 


‘Can but little more supply 
Than just to look about us and to die.’ 


“Who has ever lived to accomplish his ut- 
most aim? What career is so complete as to 
. comprehend all that is wanted of this world? 
We all retire with imperfect victory from the 
battle of life. The campaign is not finished 
when we strike tents. . . . The scholar 
has still unsolved problems at which he is 
laboring. The philosopher is summoned in the 
midst of experiments he cannot stay to com- 
plete. The philanthropist is overtaken in pro- 
jects of reform that are to add new value to 
human life.” | 


126 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 


Martineau, at eighty, though his life had 
been marvellously full of attainment, ex- 
claimed, ““How small a part of my plans have I 
been able to carry out! Nothing is so plain as 
that life at its fullest on earth is a fragment.” 

Sir Isaac Newton, at the end of a life that 
achieved more for science than almost any 
other of modern times, compared himself to a 
child who had merely gathered a few pebbles 
on the beach, while the vast ocean lay beyond 
unexplored. 

Victor Hugo, in his old age, declared: “For 
half a century I have been writing my thoughts 
in prose and verse: history, philosophy, 
drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and 
song. I have tried all. But I feel I have not 
said a thousandth part of what is in me.” 

Now what is the explanation of this strange, 
dark riddle of the incompleteness of human 
life—the fragmentariness of even the fullest 
earthly career? If man is at the beginning of 
his existence, all is plain. If he is at the end, 
all is midnight darkness. I know of no phi- 
losophy that gives us a ray of light except that 
of Hugo, who completed the passage from 
which I have quoted by adding: “When I go 
down to the grave I can say, like so many 
others, ‘I have finished my day’s work,’ but I 
cannot say, ‘I have finished my life.’ I shall 


IMMORTALITY 127 


begin again next morning. The tomb is not 
a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. I close on 
the twilight to open with the dawn.” 

With this philosophy of life, all is luminous. 
Fragments that are parts of larger wholes, 
we can understand. Beginnings that are meant 
to go on until some worthy end is reached, 
we can understand. We can understand in- 
completeness that is on its way to complete- 
ness. But fragments that have no meaning, 
incompleteness that ends with itself, begin- 
nings that were never intended to be any- 
thing else but beginnings, throw us into utter 
intellectual confusion. We are dazed and 
dumb. We have the sense that all intelligence 
has gone out of the universe, and that the 
rational foundation of things has given way. 

5. This leads to a final reason which com- 
pels me to believe in immortality for man. It 
is that I may keep my faith in the rationality 
of nature, or, to express it better, in the rea- 
sonableness of God’s work. 

Wherever I look in the heavens or in the 
earth, there are signs of a divine wisdom. In- 
deed with such wisdom the whole universe is 
ablaze, from mightiest sun down to tiniest 
molecule. Order is everywhere; adaptation is 
everywhere; harmony is everywhere; law is 
everywhere. All this means that reason is 
at the heart of things. 


128 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


But if this be so, then must man be immor- 
tal. For it is impossible to believe that ra- 
tionality holds everywhere else. and breaks 
down when it comes to man. Everything be- 
low man has its raison d’étre; does man have 
none? Everything else has its clear aim and 
purpose; was man, the highest of all, made 
only to be destroyed as soon as completed? 
Everywhere below man there is progress. The 
inorganic prepares the way for the organic. 
The organic rises to the psychic. The psychic 
culminates in man, a being who can reason, 
and thus put himself into relations with the In- 
finite Reason; who can ‘‘think God’s thoughts 
after him’; who can know, and admire, and 
consciously put himself into harmony with 
God’s laws; who can understand justice, right- 
eousness, and truth; who can aspire and wor- 
ship, and meet God’s love with an answering 
love, as a child responds to the affection of a 
parent. Can we believe that God, having 
through an evolutionary process of millions of 
years, and at an expense so vast that we can 
only call it infinite, brought into existence a 
being so high, so near in nature to himself, 
has nothing for that being but death and ex- 
tinction as soon as made? Then the rational- 
ity of the universe breaks down. God is less 
intelligent than even a man; for no man would 


IMMORTALITY 129 


do anything so utterly without reason as that. 

If a man should plant fruit trees and cut 
them down as soon as they began to bear fruit, 
or paint pictures and destroy them as soon as 
finished, or build ships never intending to 
send them to sea, we should say he had lost 
his reason, and call him a fool and not a man. 
But even such folly would seem to be as noth- 
ing compared with that which could bring man 
into existence as the crown and culmination 
of nature’s infinitely vast and infinitely ex- 
pensive evolutionary process, only to blot him 
out as soon as made. 

No, I am compelled to believe that man will 
not be destroyed—that God has made him to 
partake of his own divine nature and be as 
immortal as himself, because I believe in the 
reasonableness of God’s work. Faith in God 
seems necessarily to carry with it 


“faith 


That, some far day, will be found 
Ripeness in things now rathe, 

Wrong righted, each chain unbound, 
Renewal born out of scathe. 


*T have faith such end shall be. 
From the first Power was—I knew; 
Life has made clear to me 
That, strive but for closer view, 
Love were as plain to see. 


130 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


“When see? When there dawns a day, 
If not on the homely earth, 
Then yonder, worlds away, 
Where the strange and new have birth 
And Power comes full in play.” 


It is said that God suffers other things to 
perish —then why not man? The reply is, 
What does he permit to perish whose cost 
bears any comparison with that of man?—or 
whose intrinsic greatness is to be even men- 
tioned beside man’s? 

In a world where Evolution is the law, it 
seems inevitable that man’s body must die. 
But what need for his soul to die? The de- 
struction of his body is a slight matter. But 
the death of his soul would be an infinite loss — 
—not only involving the destruction of man, 
but seeming to take all meaning out of the 
evolutionary process, and thus virtually to 
destroy God — for what God have we left if 
we can see no meaning in his universe? 

For one, I cannot believe the universe 
idiotic. That God’s evolutionary process by 
which he has created both the world and man 
means something great and worthy, I do not 
even know how to question. Much more easily 
could I question my own sanity. But if it does 
mean something great and worthy, then man 
is safe, and safe forever. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, AND CHRIS- 
LEAN De CON TD Hee uTG HT) OF 
EVOLUTION 


IN the light of Evolution, how are we to 
look upon the Bible? 

I answer: The most obvious fact to be 
noted is that the Bible is one of the world’s' 
great sacred books. 

Sacred books are not peculiar to Christian- 
ity and Judaism. The Hindus have theirs; 
the Buddhists have theirs; the Chinese have 
theirs; the Mohammedans have theirs. Most 
Christian scholars rank ours as higher in 
moral and spiritual value than any of the 
others. I have given some study to all, and it 
seems to me that ours is justly to be placed 
first. But whether this be true or not, it is 
plain that all belong to one class; all are 
members of one family. 

Sacred books mark a stage in the religious 
progress of mankind. They are at once re- 
sults of that progress, and factors in it. 

Some sacred books spring from a man, 7 
great prophet or religious teacher. They are 
the record of his teachings and his life. Thus 


132 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


the Koran of the Mohammedans is the record 
of the life and teachings of Mahomet. The 
Tripataka (or Three Baskets) of the Bud- 
dhists, gives us the teachings of Buddha. Our 
Gospels give us the life and teachings of Jesus. 

Other sacred books spring from the people, 
rather than from any single person; they are 
the product of the people’s religious life for 
a considerable period of time. Such are the 
Vedas of India. These Vedas are composed 
of hymns and prayers and religious liturgies, 
and were hundreds of years in coming into 
existence. Such, too, is our Old Testament, 
which was also hundreds of years in coming 
into being. Our Bible as a whole, including 
the Old Testament and the New, spans more 
than a thousand years of time, between the 
origin of its earliest book and the origin of 
its latest. | 

We call the Bible a book; it is much more 
accurate to think of it as a literature — the. 
literature of the Hebrew people for a period 
essentially as long as from King Alfred the 
Great to the present day. 

This literature is wholly natural — as nat- 
ural as a literature could possibly be. It 
sprang out of all that was real and earnest 
in the history and experience of the people — 
their public life, their private life, their secular 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 133 


life, their religious life; peace, war; pros- 
perity, adversity; birth, marriage, death; joy, 
sorrow; youth, age; the home, the synagogue, 
the temple; the life of the shepherd, caring 
for his sheep almost as if they were children, 
leading them by the side of still waters and 
in green pastures, and protecting them from 
the foes that waited to attack and devour; the 
life of the agriculturist, sowing and reaping 
his grain, or caring for his vineyard; the life 
of the city, with its buying and selling; the 
life of the king, with its public duties and 
cares, and with its outward splendors. Prose, 
poetry, history, biography; elaborate ecclesi- 
astical regulations, law codes, genealogies; 
legends, myths, tales of sweet peace, tales of 
horrible blood and battle and barbarity; 
thrilling phophecies of hope, pessimistic wails 
of despair; earnest prayers, tender hymns of 
devotion, solemn hymns of contrition, soul- 
stirring hymns of joy and praise; wise prov- 
erbs, beautiful parables, crude superstitions of 
an unscientific age; idyls of love, romances, 
odes, elegies, epistles, wild apocalyptic dreams, 
mighty moral appeals, tremendous denuncia- 
tions of wrong—almost all forms of utterance 
by which life can be portrayed or the human 
soul can give expression to its hopes and fears, 
its fruitions and disappointments, its contri- 


134 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


tions, aspirations, and highest worships, its 
struggles, its defeats, and its victories — all 
these, slowly, and by wholly natural causes, 
gathered together into a single volume, con- 
tribute to make up this marvellous, this many- 
sided, this in many ways imperfect, yet this 
great and incomparably precious book wae 
we call our Bible. 

But when I say that no book ever came into 
existence more naturally, that does not mean 
that God was not init. It means that God was 
in it; for the natural is God’s way of doing 
things—that is what makes it natural. No 
book was ever more deeply or truly a human 
book. But because it was a human book, 
therefore it was a divine book. For where 
is God’s fullest revelation of himself except 
in the human? God speaks through the stars 
of the night, the flowers of the field, and 
all the marvellous on-goings of physical na- 
ture. But his clearest speech is ever in man’s 
soul. Because the Bible is rich with deep 
revelations of the human, it is rich with deep 
revelations of God; for ever through that 
which is deepest and truest in human souls— 


1 See the author’s book, “The Origin and Char- 
acter of the Bible,” chapters i., ii., iv., xv., xvi, 
xxiii. The Beacon Press, Inc. 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 135 


our own or other men’s—we approach nearest 
to God. 

In the history of the human race, different 
nations and peoples have different parts to 
perform. The genius of Greece was intellect- 
ual and esthetic. The genius of Rome was 
legal, organizing, practical. The genius of 
Palestine was ethical and spiritual. Greece, 
through her art and poetry and philosophy, 
had a work to do, not only for herself, but for 
all peoples. Rome, through her law, had a 
work to do, not only for herself, but for man- 
kind. Palestine, through her religion, had a 
still more important work to do for the world. 
We speak of the Jews as a chosen people. And 
truly they were. But what people that is true 
to itself, true to its own genius and mission, 
is not a chosen people? What people does not 
have a place to fill in the progress of the race, 
even if its place be not so important as that 
of the Greeks or the Jews? Thus we see how 
large are God’s ways; and by how many agen- 
cies he carries on the divine education of hu- 
manity. 

It is important for us to understand, not 
only that the Bible grew, grew as naturally as 
any other literature—part by part, this book 
or fragment of a book in this age, and that in 
the next, and so on, as long as the Jewish 


136 EVOLUTION AND LEELIGION 


people continued to live in Palestine—but it is 
also important for us to understand that this 
literary growth was accompanied by, and reg- 
isters, a distinct moral growth, a distinct relig- 
ious advance of the people from first to last. 

The religion of Israel was not equally per- 
fect in its earlier and later periods. It did 
not start as high as it ended. On the con- 
trary it started very low, and only rose to its 
later elevation very slowly, and through varied 
experiences and long struggles. When the 
children of Israel first came into Palestine 
from Egypt, under the leadership of Moses, 
they were newly liberated slaves. Their civi- 
lization was very crude, their moral develop- 
ment was rudimentary, their conceptions of 
religion and of God were very imperfect. 
They had been idolaters, and were only just 
beginning to lay the idolatry aside; and for 
hundreds of years they kept lapsing back into 
idolatry, again and again, whenever they could 
find any pretext. Their ideas of the divine 
character were hardly above those held by the 
heathen peoples around about them. They 
thought of Jehovah as getting angry, as 
jealous, as repenting, as deceiving, as sanc- 
tioning fraud, as commanding shocking cruel- 
ties, such as the slaughter of thousands of 
men, women, and innocent children, as mani- 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC. 137 


festing every passion and imperfection otf 
man. Not only were there vast numbers of 
bloody animal sacrifices offered to him, but 
even human sacrifices, as in the cases of 
Jephtha’s daughter, and Abraham’s offering 
of Isaac, commanded, but at the last moment 
averted; and Samuel hewing King Agag in 
pieces “before the Lord.” 

And the morals of the people were not high- 
er than their ideas of God. Read such books 
as Joshua and Judges, and see the lawlessness 
and cruelty that abound; assassinations like 
those committed by Ehud and Jael; brutalities 
like those practiced upon Adonibezek and the 
seventy kings; debaucheries like those of Sam- 
son; Samuel’s words to Saul, “Smite Amalek; 
destroy all; slay man and woman, infant and 
suckling.”’ 

I say, such was the low condition of civiliza- 
' tion, morals, and religion among the Israelites, 
when, soon after emerging from the bondage 
of Egypt, they began their national career in 
Palestine. It was from this that they rose to 
what they afterward became. This was the 
starting-point of that remarkable evolution, 
which as the centuries went on, lifted them to 
such a height, and gave them the psalms, the 
prophets, and finally Jesus and Paul, and the 
lofty teachings of the New Testament. 


138 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


What is the Bible? It is the record of this 
long Evolution. It is the literature growing 
out of this Evolution—all stages of the Evolu- 
tion. Some of these books spring from its 
earliest and crudest stage; some from a stage 
a step higher; and others from the various 
stages, on to the last. Do you wonder, there- 
fore, that not all parts of the Bible teach the 
same religion or the same morality? There 
is hardly a thoughtful, candid person to be 
found who has not read things in the Old Tes- 
tament that have shocked him. He has said 
to himself, Can it be possible that a divine and 
infallible book can contain such teachings, as 
the word of God? Many a man, finding these 
things in the Bible—for they cannot be hidden 
from sight—has turned away in disgust and 
said, I will have nothing more to do with such 
a book, or the religion that it enjoins. It was 
these things that gave such power to Mr. In- 
gersoll’s arraignments of the Bible. See, he 
said, these things are your Bible. These things 
are the teachings of your infallible book. 
These things are your divine religion. What 
answer could be made? None, by men who 
held to the common doctrines of Bible infalli- 
bility ; who held that all parts of the Bible are 
of equal inspiration and equal authority. The 
only answer that could be made, or that can 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 139 


be made, is that which intelligent and candid 
Bible scholarship offers, which shows us that 
the Bible is not all one book; its parts are not 
all of equal inspiration or value; it is an evolu- 
tion; it represents all stages of the moral and 
religious progress of the Hebrew people, from 
polytheism to Christianity; from God, a God 
of vengeance and cruelty and blood, to God, a 
being of justice and love, a Father in Heaven; 
from the ethics which says, Hate and kill your 
enemies, to the ethics which says, Love your 
enemies; from Samson and his ideals of lust, 
cunning, and physical strength, to Jesus with 
his ideals of purity, pity, and brotherhood. 
As soon as we fully grasp this idea of 
growth, progress, evolution in the religion of 
the Bible, we are no longer troubled by the 
low views of God and morality which we find 
in certain Scriptural books. They are what 
we expect. We see that they are the natural 
and necessary products of their time. They 
show us the early stage of the evolutionary 
process; they show us what later the Jewish 
people themselves outgrew and passed by. 
Nobody has made this clearer than Jesus. 
Jesus says: “Ye have heard that it hath been 
said (by men in the earlier time), ‘Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy.’ But 
I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them 


140 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


that curse you, and do good to them that hate 
you.” ‘Ye have heard that it hath been said, 
‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’; 
but the time for that has passed by. I say un- 
to you, Resist not evil.”” Now which of these 
teachings are we to follow, the earlier and 
lower, found in Exodus and Deuteronomy? or 
the later and higher, found in the Sermon on 
the Mount? We cannot follow both. No, the 
only thing which can save us from utter con- 
fusion in interpreting the Bible, is a recogni- © 
tion of the fact that it is an evolution. It is 
not all of equal value. It is not all of equal 
authority. Some parts are outgrown, as Jesus 
said. Some parts represent the child-stage of 
religion and ethics; other parts represent that 
which is somewhat more mature and complete, 
on to that which is highest and best in the 
great prophets and in Jesus. Here, where the 
evolution reaches its summit, we have teach- 
ings which can never be outgrown. Here we 
have truth which will be food for the moral 
and spiritual life of man forever. 

And now we see where Jesus stands in this 
evolution. He is its consummation and crown. 

It is important to notice how all intellectual 
and moral progress in the world is promoted. 


1 See “The Origin and Character of the Bible,” 
chapters xix., XxX., XXi., xxii. 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 141 


It is always promoted by means of men su- 
perior to their fellows. Men of larger knowl- 
edge or deeper insight into truth rise up and 
become leaders of their time. They are lights 
which others follow. 

In the history of Israel, the prophets were 
the men who led the advance. Nearly every 
generation had its prophet souls, men of pre- 
eminent moral earnestness, men of faith, men 
of conscience, men of religious zeal and fervor, 
men of clearer vision of God and eternal 
things than their fellows. 

These prophets differed greatly in intellect- 
ual ability, in moral attainments, and in 
spiritual insight. But they were all religious- 
ly in advance of the people, and so they were 
able to lead the nation on. In the prophets the 
religious genius of Israel rose to its highest. 
Some of these prophets were lofty souls, the 
' purity and nobleness of whose character and 
the moral splendor of whose teachings have 
shed undying lustre upon Palestine, and con- 
ferred inestimable benefit upon the race. 
Among the greatest we may name Hosea, Mi- 
cah, Jeremiah, the first and the second Isaiah, 
and Paul. But the greatest of all was Jesus. 
In him the matchless plant of Hebrew proph- 
ecy reached its tallest and finest blossom. 

When the Greek race, whose genius for art, 


142 EVOLUTION AND EKELIGION 


for poetry, and for phlosophy was the highest 
in the ancient world, produced its best, is it 
any wonder that it gave to mankind a Phidias, 
a Sophocles, and a Plato? So when the He- 
brew race, whose genius for religion was the 
highest in the ancient world, produced its 
best, is it any wonder that it gave to mankind 
an Isaiah, a Paul, and a Jesus? Thus we see 
what is the place that Evolution assigns to 
Jesus. It lifts him up to the position of the 
greatest of the Hebrew prophets, and that 
means to the place of the greatest of the 
religious teachers of the ancient world. Was 
there ever conferred upon man a more ex- 
alted honor than this? 

And now what are we to say concerning the 
religion of Jesus? Does Evolution disturb 
' that? 

Of course in order to answer this question 
we must inquire, What was the religion of 
Jesus? 

We have found our past studies of Evolu- 
tion pushing everything pertaining to any sup- 
posed fall of the race in Adam quite back into 
the realm of legend and myth. The race did 
not have its origin six thousand years ago, but 
many times six thousand. Man was not 
created in an exalted and perfect condition, 
from which he has fallen. He was created in 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 143 


a low and imperfect condition, from which he 
has risen. 

Where shall we go to find the religion of 
Jesus? Some tell us to the creeds. But why 
to the creeds? Did he write them? Most of 
the creeds were written quite in modern times. 
The oldest creeds we have are the Athanasian 
Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the so-called 
Apostles’ Creed. When were they written? 
All of them in dark ages, when Christianity 
had wandered far away from the teachings of 
Christ; not one of them within three hundred 
years of the Master’s time. It is the impres- 
sion of many that at least the so-called 
Apostles’ Creed goes back to the time of the 
apostles. But this is a mistake. Dean Stan- 
ley says that about all we know concerning its 
origin is that the apostles had nothing what- 
ever to do with it. We do, however, know 
something more than this. We know that it 
came into existence centuries this side of the 
apostolic age. 

Where, then, shall we go to find out what 
was the religion of Jesus? Plainly, we must 
go to the New Testament. But to what part of 
the New Testament? Some parts were writ- 
ten earlier than others. Some parts tell us 
directly about Jesus; some do not. It is clear 
that to get closest to Jesus, we must go to the 


144 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


Gospels. But here again there is a difference. 
Probably the earliest of the Gospels is Mark. 
Next in time to Mark come Matthew and Luke. 
John is very late. So, then, we must go to 
Mark, Matthew, and Luke. 

What, then, does the Sermon on the Mount 
contain—this completest setting forth of his 
religious doctrine that Jesus makes anywhere? 

\ Its great central thought is the Fatherhood 
of God and the Brotherhood of Man. God is 
our Father. We are all brothers. Therefore 
we must live like brothers, and love like bro- 
thers, and be kind and forgiving and helpful 
to one another like brothers. We must be pure 
in heart, we must be peaceable, we must be 
merciful, we must love even our enemies, we 
must be sincere, we must do nothing to be seen 
of men, we must offer to God deeds not words, 
lives not professions. This is the religion of 
Jesus, as found in the fullest description that 
he anywhere gives of it. Could a religion be 
simpler? Could any be more profound? Could 
‘any be more beautiful? Could any be nobler? 
Could any be more uplifting to humanity? 
Could any be farther removed from the creeds 
and theologies taught in his name? 

Turn from the Sermon on the Mount to 
other parts of the Gospels, and what do we 
find? In one place Jesus gives an epitome of 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 145 


his religion —a statement in three sentences 
of what is the sum and substance of it all. 
What is it? Love. Love to God and to one’s 
neighbor. That is the whole. That is re- 
ligion! How it compasses within its wide 
arms all heaven and allearth. Yes, and every 
possible hell! How it transforms earth into 
heaven! and insures that no hell shall fail to 
be transformed into heaven at last! 

From the very beginning of his ministry, 
and all through, Jesus declares that his work 
is to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth. 
What is the kingdom of heaven? It is purity 
and love and righteousness. It is the reign 
of God in the soul of man. His disciples asked 
him who was the greatest. He answered, He 
that serves. He took a child and set it in their 
midst and said, “Of such is the kingdom of 
heaven.” He taught that true worship is wor- 
- ship of the Father in spirit and in truth. 

Much of his teaching was in parables. What 
do these parables teach? The scheme of 
theology found to-day in the leading creeds of 
Christendom? Nothing of the kind. They 
teach a practical religion of love and mercy 
and good deeds. The greatest of the parables 
are those of the Good Samaritan and the 
Prodigal Son. The lesson of the Parable of 
the Good Samaritan is, that we make a mis- 


on_—e-_ 


146 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


take if we think that the best religion in this 
world is confined to those who bear the re- 
ligious names and occupy the prominent 
places in religious circles. The priest who 
was an accepted religious teacher, and the 
Levite who belonged to the religious set, had 
less real religion than the poor despised 
Samaritan; for they both passed by the poor 
robbed and wounded man with only looks of 
pity, but the Samaritan ministered to him 
with deeds of pity and service. | 
What is the religion of the Parable of the 
Prodigal Son? It, too, is very far from the 
religion of the generally accepted creeds and 
theologies. A boy goes away from home, and 
falls into wild and evil ways. At last he reaps 
what he sows, as all men must sooner or later, 
and he falls into misery and want. Those 
who have been his companions in his sin 
desert him when misfortune comes. He has 
no money, no friends; his ‘distress is great. 
Now he sees the evil of his ways. Bitterness 
and sorrow and contrition fill his soul. In his 
misery, he remembers his home and his father. 
Does his father still love him? Can his father 
forgive him? The best that is in him speaks 
and says, “I will arise and go to my father, 
and I will say, Father, I have sinned against 
heaven and before thee, and am no more 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 147 


worthy to be called thy son; make me as one 
of thy hired servants.” ‘So he arose and went 
to his father. What did he find? Had the 
fountains of love gone dry in the father’s 
heart? They know not a father’s love who 
think that. The father, waiting, waiting for 
his return, “saw him while yet he was a great 
way off, ran, fell on his neck, and kissed him,” 
exclaiming with a joy which words could but 
poorly express, “This, my son, was dead, and 
is alive; was lost, and is found.” Such is the 
tender and beautiful story. 

Such, then, is the religion of Jesus, as we 
find it in the Gospels which take us nearest to 
him. Such, according to the earliest and best 
witnesses, and according to the testimony of 
his own words, is Christianity as Christ 
preached it and lived it. It is no scheme. It 
depends for its truth upon no Adam. The 
religion of Jesus is spiritual, ethical, of the 
heart, of the conscience. It is love, it is wor- 
ship, it is duty, it is service, it is the pure 
heart and the right life, and it is nothing else. 

What attitude does Evolution take toward 
such a religion? Does it oppose it? Does it 
disturb it? On the contrary, such a religion 
is exactly in line with Evolution in its higher 
aspects. The world’s evolution reaches its 
highest in man. Man’s evolution reaches its 


148 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


highest in the moral and spiritual. The moral 
and spiritual tends ever toward such a re- 
ligion as that of Jesus as its highest possible 
expression and embodiment. 

Jesus taught the universal religion, the eter- 
nal religion, because he taught the religion of 
the soul, the religion of love and life. Toward 
that religion Judaism had been tending for 
centuries. Much that he taught had been 
taught by others before him. Indeed much 
had been taught in other lands, outside of 
Palestine—by great spiritual seers and pro- 
phets in India and Greece and elsewhere. But 
he saw with a clearer vision than it had been 
given any other to see. So he was able to 
plant a banner higher up the hills of God than 
any other had done. He was able to inaugu- 
rate a religious movement more elevating, 
more quickening, more fruitful than any other 
in the history of the world. 

It is instructive to notice that there has 
never been any conflict between science and 
the religion of Jesus. The battles which 
science has had to fight have been with the 
theologies which have arisen and attached 
themselves to the religion of Jesus, but were 
no part of it. The new astronomy taught by 
Copernicus and Galileo had a long battle to 
fight with theology. So had physics when it 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 149 


came on the scene. So had geology. Evo- 
lution is fighting such a battle now. So is bib- 
lical scholarship. But none of these battles 
have ever disturbed the religion of Jesus. 
That religion was at home under the old; it is 
at home under the new. It sees in science and 
enlarged knowledge friends, not enemies. The 
more of light, the more of God. 

Why has the Christian church wandered so 
far away from the religion of Jesus? Why is 
its teaching to-day so much below that of the 
Master? 

The explanation is partly, at least, in the 
greatness of Jesus. He was so much ahead of 
his time. 

The world to-day in art is not up to Michael 
Angelo. The world to-day in poetry is not up 
to Shakespeare. The reason is, these men 
were so great. They were so far in advance 
of nearly all the rest of mankind. But the fact 
that they lived and wrought has been a power 
ever since to move the world forward. Only, 
the world is so large—the mass to be moved is 
so great! 

So with Jesus. Was it to be expected that the 
world could be brought up to him in a cen- 
tury, or in twenty centuries? Yet it is on the 
way. And his influence is perhaps the might- 
iest single force in helping on the advance. 


150 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


We talk about Christianity having early 
conquered the Roman Empire; and later con- 
quering the barbarian peoples of central and 
northern Europe. But as a fact these so- 
called conquests were generally compromises, 
and half-surrenders. Christianity “stooped 
to conquer.” She gave to the “conquered” 
countries the Christian name, but she accepted 
much of their heathenism in return, and in- 
corporated it into her own thought, institu- 
tions, forms of worship, and life. Perhaps 
under the circumstances this was inevitable. 
Possibly it was the only way in which the 
Christianizing process could begin at all— 
the only way in which the first step could be 
taken toward the purer truth and higher life 
which the religion of Jesus meant. But for 
the time being it seriously corrupted Chris- 
tianity. It left the world with a vast deal of 
religion calling itself by the Christian name 
which in reality was nearly as much heathen 
as Christian. It was inevitable that sooner or 
later Christianity should awake to conscious- 
ness of the fact that it was corrupted with 
this heathen element, and must purify itself. 
Its first great awakening in this direction was 
the Protestant Reformation. The work begun 
then did not stop, but has continued, and is 
going forward in our day on a vastly larger 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 151 


scale, with more radical and thorough-going 
ends in view, and impelled by more numerous 
forces of enlightenment, than ever before. 
Now, for the first time since the age of the 
apostles, the world is getting a considerable 
body of churches planted distinctly upon the 
highest ethical and spiritual teaching of 
Jesus—that which he himself declared to be 
the centre and soul of his religion—namely, 
God’s Fatherhood and Man’s Brotherhood, or 
Love to God and Love to Man. These facts 
fill the future with hope. This work of puri- 
fication and enlightenment will go on. Noth- 
ing can stop it. All the forces of progress are 
on its side. Sometime Christianity will bef 
really Christian. 

The cry is raised in many quarters in our 
day, Back to Jesus! At first thought this 
seems like acry of retrogression. I think it is 
not. I think it is a summons to an se wal 
It is a summons back from smaller leaders to 
a greater; above all, it is a summons away 
from those theologies which have so obscured 
and weighted the religion of Jesus, back to 
that religion itself, as it shines in the teach- 
ings and life of the Master. Such a going 
back is a real going forward. It is a going 
back to get a clearer vision, a higher inspira- 
tion, a nobler banner, with which to press on. 


152 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 


No, the work of Jesus is not done. The in- 
fluence of his religion is only in ‘its morning. 
The lovers of Jesus need not fear. The world 
is moving on, and in a sense deeper than ever 
before Jesus is its leader. 

The study of the evolution of religion has 
many lessons to teach. 

One is a lesson of hope. All evolution is at 
once a history and a prophecy. The law which 
has been operative in the past we know will be 
operative in the future. The world cannot go 
permanently backward. 

We are sometimes tempted to think there is 
no evolution in connection with things re- 
ligious because the evolution does not proceed 
in straight lines, in all lands at once, and with 
steady, unbroken progress through the cen- 
turies. But no evolution proceeds in that way. 
All forms of evolution on the globe have been 
iregular — now fast, now slow, now pushing 
forward in one direction, now in another, and 
now seeming for a time to recede. Yet on the 
whole there has been advance. Evolution, re- 
ligious and other, is like a great river. Here 
its path is straight, here it is tortuous; here its 
current is strong, here it is sluggish; here 
there is an eddy, with a backward flow. Yet 
the river makes progress; it grows deeper and 
wider as it advances; when it begins its career 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 153 


in the mountains, it is a rill; when it pours its 
waters into the sea, it is a great flood. 

The fact that man’s moral and spiritual de- 
velopment has been carried so far as we now 
see, is a pledge that it will be completed. The 
Eternal Wisdom will leave none of its great 
tasks half done; especially this, the highest, 
the crowning one of all. The evolution of re- 
ligion means that man will at last be man. 
The inheritances from the brute that still 
cling to him will one day be subdued and put 
under the control of reason and conscience. 
Sometime he will learn to love God and his 
brother. Then earth will be heaven. 

One important lesson which the study of 
religious evolution has to teach us all is, that 
real progress can never be made by ignoring 
the past. The true radical is the true con- 
servative; the true conservative is the true 
radical. We cannot cut ourselves off from 
the past without death. “The past of religion, 
as of all other things, is the great mother 
breast which holds the nourishment of hu- 
manity, present and future.” Those whom 
God has placed at the front of the religious 
progress of our time, need above all others 
to learn this lesson. If we would go forward 
safely, we must keep our communication open 
toward the past; not to retreat to positions 


154 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


rightly left behind, but to draw needed sup- 
plies for our further advance. 

Not, as some would have us believe, by 
lightly throwing away the Bible because it 
is not all good, but by using it wisely, passing 
by its dross and treasuring up its gold; not 
by turning away from Jesus because myths 
and legends have sprung up around his name, 
and because some have worshipped him as 
God, but by seeing him as he is, by recogniz- 
ing his greatness, and by making him our 
friend, our teacher, and our brother; not by 
surrendering prayer because prayer may lend 
itself to superstition and pharisaism, but by 
praying more sincerely, reasonably, and nobly; 
not by giving up the church because it has 
sometimes been employed for unworthy ends, 
but by putting it to the high uses of which it 
is capable; not by casting aside all religious 
forms, but by purifying them, and filling them 
with sincerity and life — shall we be able to 
make our religion a real evolution, and build 
up for ourselves and our children a faith bet- 
ter than that of the past. 

Evolution teaches us, as no other thought | 
can do, that the past belongs to us, a heritage 
infinitely rich and precious. But it belongs 
to us, not as a stream emptying itself into 
the present as a pool, to stagnate and dry up 


THE BIBLE, JESUS, ETC, 155 


and breed disease and die. The past belongs 
to us as a stream that must flow on through 
the present into the future, to bless that. If 
Evolution means receiving from what has 
been, it no less means contributing to what 
shall be. It means unselfishness. It means 
giving. It means making ourselves willingly 
and joyfully a part of God’s eternal order. 
Evolution means a face set to the future, to- 
ward which we press with faith and high pur- 
pose. It means believing in some better thing, 
and forever some better thing, for religion, for 
man, and for the world; believing in it so 
earnestly that we shall gladly make ourselves 
co-workers with God to bring the consumma- 
tion. 


APPENDIX I 


THE BATTLE TO DRIVE EVOLU- 
TION OUT OF THE SCHOOLS 


STRENGTH OF THE ANTI-EVOLU- 
TION FORCES 


The widespread character and the amazing 
strength of the movement to shut out by legis- 
lative action all teaching of Evolution from 
the state-aided universities, colleges, and pub- 
lic schools of the nation, were pointed out in a 
striking article in the New York Nation of 
May 20, 1925. The following are some of the 
facts cited in that article. | 

“In July, 1924, the Rev. George L. Thorpe 
of Corona, California, and others, petitioned 
the California State Board of Public Instruc- 
tion to throw out from the public schools and 
State-supported colleges all textbooks imply- 
ing or teaching the theory of Evolution. Did 
the Board politely but promptly tell Mr. | 
Thorpe to go back where he came from? It 
did not. More than six months of dillydally- 
ing, of playing with this serious matter, have 
been allowed to pass and so far as we have 


THE BATTLE 157 


been able to obtain knowledge, no decision 
has yet been reached. The fundamentalist 
strength is so great in Southern California 
that there is much fear that this anti-evolu- 
tionist movement, in one form or another, 
under one guise or another will succeed; and 
thus that the high-school students of the state 
will be doomed to grow up in ignorance of 
modern evolutionary science, with all this im- 
plies, and the splendid scientific work of the 
University of California will be ruined or 
seriously curtailed. 

“In Oklahoma, for more than two years it 
has been impossible to teach the evolution 
theory in the public schools. Tennessee has 
just passed a similar law. In Florida the leg- 
islature passed a resolution advising school 
boards or trustees not to employ any instructor 
who taught Darwinism, and a bill has been in- 
troduced making such instruction unlawful. 
In Texas the Board of Regents of the State 
University has ordained that ‘no _ infidel, 
atheist, or agnostic shall be employed in any 
capacity in the University of Texas.’ Although 
there are, of course, some evolutionists who 
are atheists, any teacher of evolution, how- 
ever firm a believer in God he might be, would 
have hard sledding under the interpretations 
of such a rule. In Kentucky and Texas the 


158 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


lower house of the legislature passed anti-evo- 
lution bills, but the upper house failed to carry 
the measure in Kentucky by the perilous mar- 
gin of one vote. The Baptists of Kentucky 
have voted to give no money to any school 
teaching Evolution. The North Carolina 
Board of Education will not employ teachers 
who believe in Evolution. Bills against the 
teaching of Evolution are pending or about 
to be presented in Mississippi, Georgia, West 
Virginia, Arkansas, Iowa, Illinois, North Da- 
kota, Minnesota, Oregon, and Arizona. 

“Throughout the entire South and South- 
west, fundamentalist and anti-evolutionist 
feeling is very strong. The Georgia Legisla- 
ture recently held up an appropriation for 
maintenance of a State Library on the avowed 
ground that books on Evolution might be 
found there. Dr. Henry Fox, Professor of 
Biology at Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, 
was forced to resign last October because he 
was a believer in and taught the theory of 
Evolution. 

“The situation in Tennessee is acute and 
interesting. Eagerly, fervently, with much 
outpouring of eloquence, the legislature has — 
decreed that any teacher in any school or 
college supported in whole or in part by state 
funds who shall teach ‘any theory that denies 


THE BATTLE 159 


the story of the divine creation of man as 
taught in the Bible, and teaches instead that 
man has descended from a lower order of 
animals,’ shall be subject to a fine of $100. 
Amazing as it seems, this law was enacted 
without a single protest from men in charge 
of State Educational Institutions. A few 
clergymen protested against it, it is good to 
say; but the State Department of Education 
was dumb, and there was never a word of 
protest from the State University. 

“Side by side with the effort to prohibit the 
teaching of Evolution goes the parallel move- 
ment to teach the creation story of the Book 
of Genesis — disguised as the reading of the 
Bible in the public schools. 

“Against the powerfully beeanioed and sub- 
sidized fundamentalist and anti-evolutionist 
groups are ranged two active bodies of pro- 
test—the American Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science and the Science League 
of America. The former has appointed a com- 
mittee which adopted resolutions condemning 
the fundamentalist attack on science, and re- 
affirming the faith of scientists in the theory 
of Evolution. 

“The other anti-fundamentalist and pro- 
evolution group, the Science League of Amer- 
ica, was founded in August, 1924, in San 


160 EVOLUTION AND KELIGION 


Francisco, for the specific purpose of opposing 
attacks on the teaching of Evolution, and for 
the defense of scientific freedom. 

Although the League is still young and reste! 
it is already doing good work, and is rapidly 
growing.” 

Some of the men at the head of this Science 
League of America are the following scien- 
tists :-— 

Dr. David Starr Jordan, Chancellor Emeri- 
tus, Leland Stanford University; Dr. Harold 
Heath, Professor of Geology, Leland Stanford 
University; Dr. H. S. Reed, Professor of 
Plant Physiology, University of California; 
Dr. William E. Ritter, Zoologist, University 
of California; Dr. Edgar L. Hewett, Director, 
School American Research, Archiological In- 
stitute of America; Dr. J. J. See, Astronomer 
United States Navy; Luther Burbank, emi- 
nent Naturalist, originator of new fruits, 
flowers, etc.; Maynard Shipley, formerly 
President of the Academy of Science, Seattle, 
Washington. 

In printed circulars sent out widely through 
the country, the League makes the following ~ 
statements and calls public attention to the 
following facts: ‘‘No one denies that the Fun- 
damentalist propaganda has resulted, during 
the past five years, in the practical outlawry 


THE BATTLE 161 


of the theory of Evolution as a basis of sci- 
ence teaching in a number of states of the 
Union. 

“A teacher of many years’ experience 
writes: ‘I realize the danger of permitting 
organized theology to dictate the policies or 
teachings in our public schools; and I have 
observed with genuine alarm the sinister en- 
croachments of prejudice and religious in- 
tolerance. Public-school teachers now hardly 
dare to have a mind of their own. How can 
we expect courageous and independent thought 
from students, if those who teach them dare 
not think? How can we expect boys and girls 
to love liberty if those who teach them are 
mental slaves?’ 

“An eminent educator writes: ‘I find that 
the publishers have been effectively intimi- 
dated by the fundamentalist agitation, for 
they all are insisting upon high-school text- 
books with Evolution left out.’ 

“Not long ago Professor C. E. Fothergill 
was compelled to resign his chair in Baylor 
University, Waco, Texas, because he had told 
his pupils that Noah’s Ark was not large 
enough to contain a pair of every species of 
animals on the earth (numbering 500,000). 

“Is it no concern of the better educated 
men and women of the United States that a 


162 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


pall of intellectual darkness is being drawn 
over the heads of the people at large? Is legal 
abolishment of freedom of research and teach- 
ing in the South and West of no vital interest 
to the people of the North and East? 

‘Besides their fervid activities in the South- 
ern States, the fundamentalists are now work- 
ing intensely in West Virginia, Minnesota, 
North Dakota, Indiana, Arkansas, Missouri, 
Arizona, Oregon, and California, and their 
field of operation constantly grows. Not even 
the northern seaboard Atlantic States, which 
feel most safe from this propaganda, are 
actually so; it must be remembered that a two- 
thirds majority of the states can ultimately 
pass an amendment to the Federal Constitu- 
tion. 

“We know that in many states the pro-fun- 
damentalists form a majority of the citizenry. 
In regard to other states, it should be re- 
membered that on the issue of the Book of 
Genesis versus Evolution—which is of course 
the real issue—the fundamentalists would be 
supported silently but systematically at the 
polls by the Roman Catholic voters; for this . 
Church, as everybody knows, is antagonistic 
to the theory of transformism as applied to 
man. Add to these groups many ‘plain citi- . 
zens’ who, while more or less indifferent to 


THE BATTLE 163 


theological doctrines, emotionally resent the 
supposed imputation that they are ‘the de- 
scendants of monkeys’ (the popular conception 
of Darwinism), and you have a political force 
to contend with which may well lead to out- 
lawry of freedom of teaching even in states 
where a more enlightened policy seems, to 
some observers, to be invulnerable to the 
attacks of fundamentalist opposition. If the 
principle is once established that the ‘guesses’ 
and ‘hypotheses’ of ultra orthodox bigots 
should properly prevail over the findings of 
scientists and educational experts—as is 
claimed by the fundamentalists—the culture 
of the Republic is doomed.” 


APPENDIX II 


TESTIMONIES OF EMINENT SCIEN- 
TISTS AS TO THE TRUTH OF EV0e 
LUTION AND ITS REAL RELA- 
TION TO RELIGION 


(A) THE TRUTH AND IMPORTANCE OF Evo- 
LUTION. 

There is no higher scientific authority in 
this country, if in the world, than the Ameri- 
can Association for the Advancement of 
Science. In view of the widespread misunder- 
standing of the doctrine of Evolution, and the 
effort made by ignorance and religious bigotry 
to convince the American public that it is not 
true science, but only a mere “guess,” and, 
withal, hostile to religion, the Association 
deemed it important in 1922 to make a public 
declaration on the subject. Accordingly, in 
January, 1923, the Council of the Association 
published the following statement: 

“The Council of the American Association 
for the Advancement of Science has thought 
it advisable to take formal action upon this 
matter, in order that there may be no ground 
for misunderstanding of the attitude of the 


TESTIMONIES 165 


Association, which is one of the largest scien- 
tific bodies in the world, with a membership 
of more than 11,000 persons, including the 
American authorities in all branches of sci- 
ence. The following statements represent the 
position of the council with regard to the 
theory of Evolution: 

1. “The Council of the Association affirms 
that, so far as the scientific evidences of the 
evolution of plants and animals and man are | 
concerned, there is no ground whatever for 
the assertion that these evidences constitute a 
‘mere guess.’ No scientific generalization is 
more strongly supported by thoroughly tested 
evidence than is that of Organic Evolution. 

2. “The Council of the Association affirms 
that the evidences in favor of the Evolution of 
Man are sufficient to convince every scientist 
of note in the world. These evidences are in- 
creasing in number and importance every 
year. 

3. ‘The Council also affirms that the the- 
ory of Evolution is one of the most potent of 
the great influences for good that have thus 
far entered into human experience; it has 
promoted the progress of knowledge, it has 
fostered unprejudiced inquiry, and it has 
served as an invaluable aid in humanity’s 
search for truth in many fields. 


166 EVOLUTION AND EELIGION 


4. “The Council of the Association is con- 
vinced that any legislation attempting to limit 
the teaching of any scientific doctrine so well 
established and so widely accepted by special- 
ists as is the doctrine of Evolution, would be a 
profound mistake, which could not fail to in- 
jure and retard the advancement of knowl- 
edge and of human welfare, by denying the 
freedom of teaching and inquiry which is 
essential to all progress.” 

As supplementary to this powerful testi- 
mony of the American Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science, we add the following 
testimonies of eminent individual scien- 
tists: — 

Frederick A. Lucas, Honorary Director of 
the American Museum of Natural History, 
New York, is reported in the New York Times 
of March 10, 1924, as saying: “The Evolution- 
ary theory is accepted by all creditable scien- 
tists to-day. It underlies all science, all 
knowledge and all human thought of this age, 
without an understanding of it one cannot 
be educated.” 

Professor John M. Coulter of the Univer- | 
sity of Chicago is reported to have said before 
a religious Congress in Chicago on April 28, 
1925: “There is no longer any question as to 
the fact of Evolution. No scientific conclu- 


TESTIMONIES 167 


sion can be overthrown by ignorant opposi- 
tion. Plants and animals have been pedigreed 
under rigid control and observed in the act of 
producing new species. It is safe to say that 
the production of one species from another 
has been demonstrated repeatedly, so that 
there is no longer any question as to the fact 
of Evolution.” New York Times, April 29, 
1925. 

Says Professor Edwin G. Conklin: ‘Not 
only the structure but the functions of the 
human body are fundamentally like those of 
other animals. We are born, nourished and 
develop, we reproduce, grow old and die, just 
as do other mammals. Specific functions of 
every organ are the same; drugs, diseases, in- 
juries affect man as they do animals, and all 
the wonderful advances of experimental medi- 
cine are founded upon this fact. Development 
from a fertilized egg to birth goes through 
the same stages in man and other mammals 
even to the repeating of gill slits, kidneys, 
heart and blood vessels like those of fishes 
and amphibians. Indeed, development from 
the egg recapitulates some of the main stages 
of Evolution — in it we see evolution repeated 
before our eyes. . . . All the evidences 
of evolution drawn from morphology, physi- 
ology, embryology, paleontology, homology, 


Phat Dtrort, 


168 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


heredity, variation, etc., speak for the evolu- 
tion of man as much as for that of any other 
organism. If evolution is true anywhere, it 
is true also of man. . . . Everything 
which speaks for the evolution of plants and 
animals speaks plainly for the evolution of 
man.” Evolution and the Bible, pp: 14, 
Loy Los 

It is not out of place to add the judgment of 
the New York Times, as expressed editorially 
on May 24, 1928: “When Mr. Bryan or any 
one else calls for repudiation of the conception 
of Evolution, he really calls upon scientific 
students, teachers, and investigators to throw 
away their chief tools. He might as well ask 
them to give up thinking altogether as to give 
up thinking and inquiring in terms of Evolu- 
tion. Into every laboratory, every fruitful 
experiment, every scientific expedition of the 
past fifty years, the general theory of Evo- 
lution has entered as a dominant factor. 
Scientists do not debate it any more; they 
instinctively accept it; it is as natural to them 
as the air they breathe. Without it they would 
be dazed, and feel that their work had lost - 
direction and utility.” 
(B) MISAPPREHENSIONS REGARDING EVOLU- 

TION. 
says Professor Edwin G. Conklin: “The 


TESTIMONIES 169 


new opponents of Evolution make much of the 
idea that Evolution is only a hypothesis or as 
they prefer to call it, a ‘guess.’ Evolution is 
a guess only in the same sense as the doctrine 
of universal gravitation, or any other general- 
ization of science, is a guess. But can one 
honestly call that doctrine a ‘guess’ which is 
supported by all the evidence available, which 
continually receives additional support from 
new discoveries, and which is not contradicted 
by any scientific evidence? It is true that we 
do not know as much as we would like to 
know about the causes of Evolution (though 
we know a good deal more than its opponents 
assume), but the same may be said with re- 
gard to the causes of gravitation, light, elec- 
tricity, chemical affinities, life or any other 
natural phenomenon. The problem of cause 
is never finally solved by science. . . . A com- 
mon misunderstanding is that man is descend- 
ed from some existing species of anthropoid 
ape and the latter from some existing species 
of monkey and so on back to certain existing 
species of lower animals. Of course this can- 
not be true, for the whole organic world has 
been evolving together. Monkeys, apes, and 
men have descended from some common but 
at present extinct ancestor. Existing apes 
and monkeys are collateral relatives of man 


170 EVOLUTION AND LELELIGION 


but not his ancestors; his cousins but not his 
parents. . . . There has been evolution 
in divergent lines. The human branch di- 
verged from the anthropoid branch not less 
than two million years ago, and since that 
time man has been evolving in the direction 
represented by existing human races; while 
the apes have been evolving in the direction 
represented by existing anthropoids. During 
all this time men and apes have been growing 
more unlike; and, conversely, the farther back 
we go the more we should find them converg- 
ing, until they meet in a common stock, which 
should be intermediate between these two 
stocks. . . . Present day apes and mon- 
keys can not become men because they have 
long since passed the parting of the ways 
which led to these two different types. . 

The resemblances between monkeys, apes, and 
man are due to the inheritance of certain com- 
mon traits which they have derived from a 
common ancestor, just as the resemblances of 
cousins are due to the inheritance of traits 
from common grandparents.” Evolution and 
the Bible, (1922), pp. 7, 8, 11-138. | 

Professor R. C. Osburn, President of the 

Ohio Academy of Science, in an address de- 
livered before that body in Columbus on April 
14, 1922, is reported to have declared: ‘There 


TESTIMONIES 171 


is some disagreement among scientists as to 
the method of Evolution. This constitutes 
one of the many prevalent misconceptions 
relative to the theory. When some scientists 
refuse to accept the idea that men descended 
from the monkey, many persons suppose that 
thus they renounce belief in Evolution. They 
do not. They merely refuse to accept one of 
the many theories relative to the origin of 
man. All scientists agree as to the fact of 
Evolution.” New York Times, April 15, 1922. 

Dr. J. Playfair McMurrick, Professor of 
Anatomy in the University of Toronto, in his 
presidential address at the opening of the 
seventy-fifth meeting of the American Asso- 
iation for the Advancement of Science, in 
Cincinnati, December 27, 1922, declared that 
the scientific doctrine of Evolution can never 
be killed by legislation. He asserts that the 
. doctrine of Evolution has supplied the guiding 
clue to the flood of new knowledge which has 
revolutionized life in recent years; most of the 
modern scientific discoveries applying to hu- 
man life would never have been made except 
for the doctrine of Evolution. Continuing he 
said: “Many make the mistake of supposing 
that Evolution is wholly identical with Dar- 
winism. The identity is only partial. Evo- 
lution as a theory long antedates Darwin. 





172 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


What Darwin did was to give a convincing 
explanation of how organic evolution might 
have occurred. Darwin’s is the greatest name 
in the history of Evolution; but much new 
knowledge has been obtained since his day, 
and much that compels scientists to adopt dif- 
ferent conclusions from his regarding some 
matters. But these new conclusions are not 
repudiations of Evolution. As a fact the 
evidence in favor of Evolution is many times 
stronger than it was in Darwin’s time, and it 
seems incredible that man as a reasoning being 
should presume to doubt as to its validity. 
Such doubts can be based only on ignorance 
of the evidence or on unreasoning prejudice.” 


(C) EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 


Even John Wesley, the founder of Metho- 
dism, saw nothing to which he felt any aver- 
sion, and nothing that seemed to him inimical 
to religion, in the thought of man as developed 
from lower forms of life, even from apes. In 
his Compendium of Natural Philosophy there 
is a chapter entitled ‘‘A General View of the 
Gradual Progression of Beings.” In this — 
chapter Wesley says: “By what degrees does 
Nature raise herself to man? . . . How 
will she rectify this head of the lower animal 
_ that is always inclined toward earth? How 


TESTIMONIES 173 


change these paws into flexible arms? What 
method will she make use of to transform 
these crooked feet into skillful and supple 
hands? . . . The ape is the rough draft 
of man, a rude sketch, an imperfect represen- 
tation, which nevertheless bears a resemblance 
to man, and is the last creature that seems 
to display the admirable progression of the 
works of God. . . . Thereisa prodigious 
number of continued links between the most 
perfect man and the ape.” 

Why should any follower of Wesley to-day, 
after reading these words, regard Evolution 
as atheistical or hostile to religion? 

Says Professor Edwin G. Conklin: “Is it 
any more degrading to hold that man was 
made through a long line of animal ancestry 
than to believe that he was made directly from 
the dust of the ground? Surely the horse and 
- the dog and the monkey belong to higher or- 
ders of existence than do the clod and the 
stone. This lowly origin does not destroy the 
dignity of man; his real dignity consists not 
in his origin but in what he is and in what he 
may become.” Evolution and the Bible, 
(1922), p. 20. 

Says Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn: 
“The moral principle in Evolution is that noth- 
ing can be gained in the world without effort. 


174 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


The ethical principle inherent in evolution is 
that only the best has a right to survive. The 
spiritual principle in evolution is the evidence 
of beauty, order, and design in the daily 
myriads of miracles to which we owe our 
existence. Evolution does not take God out 
of the universe; but, on the contrary, it vastly 
enlarges our conception of his action.” - 

Says Professor Robert J. Millikan: “There 
have been just two great influences in the 
history of the world which have made good- 
ness the outstanding characteristic in the con- 
ception of God. The first influence was Jesus 
of Nazareth; the second influence has been the 
growth of modern science, and particularly 
the growth of the theory of Evolution.” A 
Scientist Confesses His Faith, (1928), p. 25. 


APPENDIX III 


EVOLUTION INTERPRETED. ITS 
TRUE AND DEEPER MEANING 


“That was not first which was spiritual, but that 
which is natural; and afterward that which is 
spiritual.” 

—St. Paul. 


Ro RR Re 


I, too, rest in faith 
That man’s perfection is the crowning flower, 
Toward which the urgent sap in life’s great tree 
Is pressing,—seen in puny blossom now, 
But in the world’s great morrows to expand 
With broadest petals and with deepest glow.” 


—George Eliot. 


x + * *F 


“The fossil strata show us that Nature be- 
gan with rudimental forms, and rose to the 
more complex as fast as the earth was fit for 
their dwelling-place; and that the lower per- 
ish as the higher appear. Very few of our 
race can be said to be yet finished men. We 
still carry sticking to us some remains of the 
preceding inferior quadruped organizations. 
We call these millions men; but they are not 


176 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to 
get free, man needs all the music that can be 
brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, 
with tears and joy; if Want with its. scourge; 
if War with its cannonade; if Christianity 
with charity; if Trade with its money; if Art 
with its portfolios; if Science with her tele- 
graph through the deeps of space and time, 
can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud 
taps on the tough chrysalis can break its walls, 
and let the new creature emerge erect and 
free— make way and sing paean! The age 
of the quadruped is to go out — the age of the 
Brain and the Heart is to come in.’”—Ralph 
Waldo Emerson. 


“The conviction is steadily gaining ground 
that the fact of Evolution will have to be ac- 
cepted. In a scientific age the Genesis story 
of creation cannot be received as history, but 
only as poetry or as a dream of early man. 
There was not, for instance, a certain Monday 
when there was in all the world, no single sun © 
or moon or shining star, and then a following 
Tuesday when lo, the sun shone, and the moon 
gave forth its light, and the heavens were 
studded with stars. There was not a certain 
Tuesday when there was, in all the world, no 


EVOLUTION INTERPRETED 177 


Single tree or flower or blade of grass, and 
then a following Wednesday when gigantic 
redwood lifted their branches three hundred 
feet into the air, and alpine lilies appeared on 
every mountainside, and grass grew in every 
valley. There was not a certain Wednesday 
when there was, in all the seas, no living crea- 
ture, and then a following Thursday when the 
waters swarmed with fishes. There was not 
a certain Thursday when there was, on any 
continent, no single lion or tiger or woolly 
rhinoceros, and then a following Friday when 
animals of every description roamed the 
forests and appeared upon the plains. There 
was not a certain Friday when there was, in 
all the world, no single human being, and then 
a following Saturday when a full-grown man 
appeared. Everything that is came from 
something that was. Everything that was 
came from something that was before that, 
and before that, and before that. No man or 
mountain, no lion or lichen, no fish or flower 
was ever created outright. Everything has 
evolved, higher forms of life from lower forms 
of life, and these lower forms from other 
forms lower still. That is the belief of in- 
creasing numbers of men who have devoted 
a lifetime to study of the evidence. And so, 
the conviction grows that however little we 


178 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


may yet know about the origin of species, the 
fact of evolution will have to be reckoned with 
by intelligent persons. 

“What is the bearing of this fact upon re- 
ligious faith? I shall venture to suggest not 
only that man may believe in evolution and 
still believe in God, but that a convinced evolu- 
tionist may find in the conception of evolution 
a positive support for his religious faith. 

“Nothing could be farther from the truth 
than the suggestion that ‘Evolution is an in- 
vention whereby it is hoped to get rid of God.’ 
In one of his last letters Darwin himself de- 
clared, ‘I have never been an atheist in the 
sense of denying the existence of God’. . 
Why should anyone contemplate the fact of 
Evolution with alarm? Far from banishing 
or even belittling God, it but adds to his glory. 
Far from degrading or even diminishing man, 
it but reveals his uniqueness, his imperishable 
significance. Far from destroying religion, it 
fortifies it. And what a mighty stimulus it 
brings to the most daring hopes of mankind! 
The hope that though a man die, yet shall he 
live—how it kindles that! The hope that the 
dreams of prophetic spirits will yet be realized 
in a diviner civilization, the kingdom of God 
—how it lights up that!”—Ernest Fremont 
Tittle, The Christian Century, June 11, 1925. 


EVOLUTION INTERPRETED 179 


A fire-mist and a planet,— 
A crystal and a cell,— 
A jelly fish and a saurian, 
And caves where cavemen dwell; 
Then a sense of law and beauty, 
And a face turned from the clod,— 
Some call it Evolution, 
Others call it God. 


A haze on the far horizon, 
The infinite tender sky, 

The rich ripe tint of the corn-fields 
And the wild geese sailing high,— 
And all over the upland and lowland 

The charm of the golden rod,— 
Some of us call it autumn, 
And others call it God. 


Like tides on the crescent seabeach, 
When the moon is new and thin, 
Into our hearts high yearnings, 
Come welling and surging in,— 
Come from the mystic ocean 
Whose rim no foot has trod,— 
Some of us call it Longing, 
And others call it God. 


A picket frozen on duty,— 
A mother starved for her brood,— 
Socrates drinking the hemlock, 
And Jesus on the rood; 
And millions who humble and nameless 
The straight hard pathway plod,— 
Some call it Consecration, 
And others call it God. 
—wWilliam H. Carruth. 


180 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


He hides within the lily, » 
A strong and tender Care, 
That wins the earth-born atoms 
To glory of the air; 
He weaves the shining garments 
Unceasingly and still, 
Along the quiet waters, 
In niches of the hill. 


O Toiler of the lily, 
Thy touch is in the Man! 
No leaf that dawns to petal 
But hints the angel-plan: 
The flower-horizon open, 
The blossom vaster shows; 
We hear thy wide world echo, 
‘See how the lily grows!’ 


Shy yearnings of the savage, 
Unfolding, thought by thought, 
To holy lives are lifted, 
To visions fair are wrought: 
The races rise and cluster, 
And evils fade and fall, 
Till chaos blooms to beauty, 
Thy purpose crowning all! 


—William C. Gannett. 


The One Life thrilled the star-dust through 
In nebulous masses whirled, 

Until, globed like a drop of dew, 
Shone out a new-made world. 


EVOLUTION INTERPRETED 


The One Life on the ocean shore, 
Through primal ooze and slime, 

Crept slowly on from less to more 
Along the ways of time. 


The One Life in the jungles old, 
From lowly, creeping things, 
Did ever some new form unfold,— 

Swift feet or soaring wings. 


The One Life all the ages through 
Pursued its wondrous plan, 

Till, as the tree of promise grew, 
It blossomed into Man. 


The One Life reacheth onward still! 
As yet no eye may see 

The far-off fact man’s dream fulfil,— 
The glory yet to be. 


181 


—Minot J. Savage. 





BIBLIOGRAPHY 


The following works are among the many 
which will be found useful to the student of 
Evolution and of its relation to Humanity and 
Religion. Those most useful to the general 
reader are marked with a star: 


*Darwin, Charles, “Origin of Species” 

*Darwin, Charles, “Descent of Man” 

*Darwin, Charles, “Animals and Plants under Do- 
mestication” 

*Huxley, T. H., “Man’s Place in Nature” 

Wallace, Alfred R., “Darwinism” 

*Kellogg, Vernon, ‘Darwinism To-day” 

*Kellogg, Vernon, “Evolution” 

*Jordan and Kellogg, “Evolution and Animal Life” 

*Jordan, D. S., “War and the Breed” 

McCulloch, O. C., “The Tribe of Ishmael” 

*Nicolai, G. C., “The Biology of War” 

*Poulton and Others, “Fifty Years of Darwinism” 

“Thomson, J. Arthur, “Heredity” 

*Wilson, E. B., “The Cell in Development and In- 
heritance”’ 

Davenport, Ch., “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics” 

*Thomson, J. Arthur, “The System of Animate Na- 
ture” 

Castle, W. E., “Genetics and Eugenics” 

*Conklin, E. G., “Heredity and Environment in the 
Development of Man” 

Crampton, H. E., “The Doctrine of Evolution” 

*Dickinson, G. L., “Religion” 


183 


184 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


Doncaster, L., “Evolution and Incarnation” 
Downing, E. R., “The Third and Fourth Generation” 
*Drummond, Henry, “The Ascent of Man” 
Dugdale, R. L., “The Jukes” 
Fiske, John, “Darwinism and other Essays” 
Geddes & J. A. Thompson, “Evolution” 
Gulick, J. T., “Evolution, Racial and Habitudinal” 
Haldane, J. S., “The New Physiology” 
*Hobhouse, L. T., “Morals in Evolution” 
*Holmes, S. J., “The Trend of the Race” 
Iverach, James, “Christianity and Evolution” 
Joly, J., “The Birth-Time of the World” 
Kropotkin, P., “Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution” 
Haldane, J. S., “Life and Finite Individuality” 
Lull, R. S., “Organic Evolution” 
*Osborn, H. F., “From the Greeks to Darwin” 
Otto, R., “Naturalism and Religion” 
Pettigrew, J. B., “Design in Nature’ 
Poulton, E. B., “Charles Darwin and the Theory of 
Natural Selection” 
Russell, E. S., “Form and Function” 
Scott, W. B., “The Theory of Evolution” 
Simpson, James Y., “The Spiritual Interpretation of 
Nature” 
Spencer, Herbert, “First Principles” 
Stephen, Leslie, “Ethics and the Struggle for Exist- 
ence” 
Strong, Charles A., ‘Why the Mind has a Body” 
*Thomson, J. A., “The Bible of Nature” 
*Thomson, J. A., “Darwinism and Human Life” with 
other essays 
Trotter, W., “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and 
War” 
Voisin, A., “The Evolution Theory” 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 185 


Heckel, E., “The History of Creation” 

*Huxley, T. H., “Critiques and Addresses” 

Darwin, F., “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin” 
Jordan, D. S., “‘The Heredity of Richard Roe” 











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